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CULTIVATED PLANTS 



AND 



DOMESTIC ANIMALS 

IN THEIR MIGRATION FROM ASIA TO EUROPE 

BY f 

VICTOR HEHN 



EDITED BY 

JAMES STEVEN STALLYBRASS 

editor of grimm's " teutonic mythology," etc., etc. 



CHEAP 




EDITION 



LONDON 
SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO. 

PATERNOSTER SQUARE 
189I 






13011 



W* tlje 

RIGHT HONOURABLE 

WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE. 

THIS BOOK IS 

(by permission) 

Iftejspectfullp 2DttucatctL 



iMk 



1898 



PREFACE. 



The history of our Domestic Animals and Cultivated Plants is a 
subject of absorbing interest to the educated man, and (if he knew 
it) to the uneducated man too. It forms no small part of the 
history of Man himself and his slow advance to civilization. 

We cannot afford to kick down the ladders we. have climbed 
by. If our venerable friend the " lowing Steer " has now " doffed 
the weary yoke " for good and all, and even his quite recent suc- 
cessor Dobbin bids fair to be driven off the field by a mechanical 
substitute, " the divel's oan team ; " yet, some three or four 
thousand years ago, with our first wooden plough just invented, 
and the steam-plough still a long way ahead, what could we have 
done without " the ox and the ass to ear the ground " ? 

And we have not quite done with our old friends yet ; not till 
we have learnt to relish milk and beef manufactured without the 
aid of milkmaid or butcher; not till the invalid, advised to "take 
horse-exercise," consents to take it alongside Master Tom in the 
day-nursery. And not then. The Iron Horse was to have ex- 
terminated his prototype of flesh and blood, but Dobbin seems 
inclined to stay ; nay, if we except the plough-horse and the stager, 
he is in greater request tnan ever. 

And who can state the sum of our obligations to the sheep, the 
pig, the camel, the dog, and even poor mousing Puss ? Or why 
should Chanticleer and his family, with other bipeds of the poultry- 
yard, be forgotten ? And much the same may be said of Culti- 
vated Plants — the grains, the potherbs, garden-flowers, fruit-trees, 
timber, and even ornamental trees. 



I RE FACE. 



Now the history of the Plants and Animals of Europe — of their 
reclamation from a wild state to the service of man, and their dis- 
tribution in their present locale — is susceptible of two or three 
different methods of investigation, which sometimes clash, and 
lead to opposite conclusions. It is certain that some of them are 
not natives of the countries where we find them ; that they have 
been imported from abroad. But which of them ? whence, and 
along what route ? how early, and by whom ? Our answers to 
these questions will be different, accordingly as we lean chiefly on 
Natural Science, or on Ancient History, Literature, and even 
Language. 

The purely scientific man will judge chiefly by the suitability of 
soil and climate. If he finds a plant flourishing pretty abun- 
dantly in Greece or Italy now, and knows of no climatic or geo- 
logic changes that would exclude its having flourished there 5,000 
years ago, he will at once pronounce it indigenous, and scout the 
notion of its having been imported. 

But now listen to the scholar, and he may tell you that Homer 
never mentions such a plant ; that later poets speak of it in a 
vague way as something very choice and very holy, and always in 
connection with some particular deity : they may have tasted its 
fruit, may have seen the figure of its flowers (probably conventional) 
in emblematic painting or carving, but have not the faintest notion 
of its shape or size, whether it be a grass, a shrub, or a tree ; till 
at last, in the time of Darius or Alexander, the plant itself emerges 
into clear visibility. Your inference will be, that it came to 
Greece within historical times. 

Or suppose the plant was common in Greece in Homer's time, 
so common that all memory of its introduction had died away, 
except in half-mythical traditions, say of the migration of a tribe, 
the founding of a city, and so forth ; — is such Tradition to be 
despised? Why should not the plant have been imported a 
thousand years before Homer ? Who knows how long Phoenician 
commerce, colonization, and conquest had been active, how long 
"great Zidon " and " the strong city Tyre " had stood? 

Lastly, where History, Literature, and even Tradition fail us, 
may not the modern science of Language come to our aid ? Sup- 
pose the name of the plant stands isolated in Greek, but has its 
root and a family ol relations in Hebrew or Persic ; that it can be 



PREFACE. 



traced along the coast of Asia Minor and across a string of ^Egean 
Islands to the south of Greece, or round by the Euxine and 
Thrace to Northern Greece, following the very track of Phoenician 
commerce or Iranian conquest and migration; — can we doubt 
whence the name and the thing must have come ? 

Professor Hehn thinks that of late years the Scientist has had 
too much his own way, that it is time for the Historic and Philo- 
logic methods to come into play, and have their say. Hence his 
book, which he modestly calls a historico - linguistic sketch. 
"Sketch" is a light word for the load of learning he pours out 
before us. Comparative Philology is not the thing of lucky guesses 
that the Etymology of our fathers used to be ; it has well-ascer- 
tained laws, which raise it to the dignity of a science. 

He holds that Europe owes much more to Asia than the mere 
botanist and mere zoologist are willing to admit. In particular, 
that the Flora of Southern Europe has been revolutionized under 
the hand of Man ; that the evergeen vegetation of Italy and 
Greece is not indigenous, but is mainly due to the sacred groves 
planted round the temples of Oriental gods and goddesses ; that 
in this way the laurel has followed the worship of Apollo, the 
cypress and myrtle that of " Ashtoreth of the Zidonians " (Aphro- 
dite), the olive that of Athena, and so on. At the same time, the 
reverence for the Olive, the Vine, the Fig, &c, was not all super- 
stitious fancy, but founded on their value to man as the source 
(and therefore symbol) of a higher type of life. 

He has much to say on the Indo-Europeans or Aryans at the 
time of their settling in this continent. He is inclined to place 
their status as to culture not so high as most recent writers have 
done. He even thinks they stood at a lower stage of civilization 
than the builders of the Lake-villages in Switzerland ; that instead 
of these being a " mysterious pre-Aryan race," they were Aryans 
at a comparatively advanced stage, for they cultivated barley, 
wheat, and flax, &c. In fact, the low condition of the Aryans on 
entering Europe, and their subsequent obligations, both to other 
Aryans (Iranians) in Asia, and above all to the Semitic race in 
Palestine, form perhaps the central idea of the whole book. 

The Translator has judged it best, for the convenience of the 



PREFACE. 



common reader, to banish from the body of the book many Greek 
and Latin citations — on which the Author rather prides himself — 
and disquisitions on the exact value of ancient words. In revising 
her Translation for the press, I have taken the liberty to restore 
some of this omitted matter, where it seemed essential to the argu- 
ment. If too much has been omitted, the Translator apologizes to 
the learned Author on the ground that she wished his book to be 
read. Readers with an appetite for philology will probably still 
find an abundant ftast in the " Notes," which are translated in 
full. 

J. S. S. 



CONTENTS 



INTRODUCTION . . . . * . 3 . . IJ 

THE HORSE (Equus caballus) „ . . 35 

THE VINE ( Vitis vinifera) 69 

the fig-tree {Fiats Carted) ...*.. 85 

THE olive-tree {Olea Europ<za, L.) 88 

domiciliation, tree-culture 102 

asses, mules, goats iio 

stone architecture .. = .... 1 14 

BEER . . . . 119 

BUTTER 127 

FLAX {Linum ztsitatissimum)} 

\ 132 

hemp {Cannabis sativa) ) 

LEEK. ONION . . . . . ... 153 

CUMMIN. MUSTARD ........ 162 

LENTILS AND PEAS 1 65 

LAUREL {Laurits Nobilis) ) 

\ . . . . . . . 169 

MYRTLE {Myrtits communis) ) 

THE BOX-TREE 176 

THE POMEGRANATE-TREE {Puilica granatum) . . . 180 

({Pyrus Cydonia) 

\ 185 
{Cydonia vulgaris) 



CONTENTS. 



j- . • , : 187 



THE ROSE {Rosa Gal/ica, centifolid) ] 

THE LILY {Lilium candidum) 

THE saffron {Crocus sativus) . ... 197 

THE DATE-PALM {Phcenix dactylifera) 202 

THE CYPRESS {Cupressus sempervirens) . . . . 212 

THE PLANE-TREE {Platanus Orientalis) 217 

THE PINE-TREE {Pinus pined) 223 

THE CANE {Arundo dcnax) 228 

THE PAPYRUS . 232 

CUCURB1TACEOUS PLANTS 234 

THE DOMESTIC FOWL 24I 

THE PIGEON 253 

THE PEACOCK 263 

THE GUINEA-FOWL 27 1 

THE PHEASANT 274 

GOOSE. DUCK . ' . 277 

HAWKING . 282 



[Prunus domestica ) 
THE PLUM-TREE \ [ 287 

\Prnnus insitilia . j 

THE mulberry-tree (Morus nigra) ..... 290 

ALMONDS. WALNUTS. CHESTNUTS . . . . * . 294 

the cherry-tree (Prunus cerasus) 300 

ARBUTUS {Strawberry-tree) \ 

medica {Lucerne) X 304 

CYTISUS {Laburnum) . j 

THE oleander (Neriwn Olea?idei') 309 

THE PISTACHIO {Pistacia vera) 312 

PEACH {Amygdalus Persicd) 



320 
APRICOT {Prunus Armeniaca) ' 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

FRUIT-CULTURE. IMPING, GRAFTING .... 323 

THE AGRUMI, OR ORANGE GROUP 329 

THE CAROB-TREE (Ceratonia siliqua) 340 

THE RABBIT {Lepus cunicuhis) 343 

THE CAT 346 

THE BUFFALO 354 

THE HOP {Humulus Lupulus) 358 

RETROSPECT 363 

MODERN EUROPE 372 

THE RICE-PLANT {Oryza saliva) 379 

maize {Zea Mais) 384 

BLACK MILLET {Sorgum vulgare) 385 

buckwheat {Polygonum fagopyruni). .... 386 

THE TULIP 391 

AMERICA 394 

CONCLUSION 398 

NOTES 407 



THE HISTORY AND MIGRATIONS 

OF 

CULTIVATED PLANTS AND DOMESTIC ANIMALS. 



INTRODUCTION. 

That the animal and vegetable worlds- — that is to say, the whole 
physiognomy of life, labour, and landscape in a country — may, 
in the course of centuries, be changed under the hand of 
Man is an experimental fact that, especially since the discovery 
of America, cannot be contradicted. During the last three 
centuries — in a purely historical period, since the invention of 
printing, and in full view of the civilized world — the native 
animals and plants in newly discovered islands and in the 
colonized countries of the Western Hemisphere have been sup- 
planted by those of Europe, or by a flora and fauna collected 
from all parts of the globe. In St. Helena, for instance, the 
aboriginal wild vegetation has retreated to the mountains in the 
interior of the island, driven in by an advancing circle of novel 
plants which came over the ocean in the train of Europeans. In 
the pampas of Buenos Ayres, for miles together, we meet with 
scarcely one indigenous plant; they have all succumbed to the 
usurpation of plants introduced from Europe. 

But a far wider view of the subject, extending over two or 
three thousand years, is afforded by the history of organic nature 
in Greece and Italy. These two countries in their present state 
are the result of a long and varied process of culture, and in- 
finitely removed from the point at which they were first placed by 



1 8 INTR ODUC TION. 



nature. Almost everything that strikes the northern traveller on 
crossing the Alps as novel and agreeable — the quiet, plastic beauty 
of the vegetation, the characteristic forms of the landscape and 
animals, nay, even the geological structure (in so far as it has 
become exposed by changes in its organic covering, and has then 
felt the effects of light and atmospheric agencies) — is a product of 
civilization brought about by manifold transformations during long 
periods of time. Any bird's-eye view of a tract of land in Italy 
is at the same time a survey of earlier and of later centuries in its 
history. Nature gave the polar altitude, the formation of the 
ground, and the geographical position ; all the rest is the work 
of improving culture. The contour of the peninsula, half con- 
tinent and half island ; the temperate climate ; then the multi- 
plicity of historic relations — in the earliest times the repeated 
inroads from the north, the marine traffic with Tyre, the Greek 
colonies, the near neighbourhood of opposite Africa, and the 
wide-spread Roman empire, which introduced all the gifts and 
arts of the East; later on, the Teutonic immigrations from the 
north-east, the Byzantine and the Arab dominion, the Crusades, 
the connexion of Italian seaports with the Levant ; and lastly, 
after the discovery of America, the close political union with 
Spain — all these and other circumstances and fates have produced 
the land "where amid foliage dark the golden orange glows, 
where motionless the myrtle stands, and high the laurel towers." 
The thorny, blue-green American agave and the thick-leaved 
cactus, which now cover all the shores of the Mediterranean, and 
so marvellously suit the southern rocks and gardens, were only 
brought there from America in the sixteenth century ! That 
cypress near the vine-dresser's cottage, towering in solitary gloom 
above the wilderness of fruit all round it, has its home on the 
mountains of Afghanistan. Yonder curiously twisted grey-green 
olive-trees originally came from Palestine and Syria ; the father- 
land of those date-palms in the convent garden of St. Bonaventura 
at Rome is the Delta of the Euphrates and Tigris. Though 
these and other cultivated plants seem to us true children of the 
Hesperian soil and climate, they were once strangers, slowly 
introduced in the course of ages, and at long intervals. Often 



EX HA USTION B Y CUL TURE. 19 

their history lies more or less clearly before us, but oftener still 
it must be gathered from scattered and doubtful testimony, or 
guessed by analogy. 

EXHAUSTION BY CULTURE. 

But what if the transformation we now behold be mere corrup- 
tion, over-cultivation, and decay of vital power ? An opinion so 
hostile to culture has not wanted advocates among learned men. 
They say that, as the whole human race has degenerated from a 
former nobler state, and all we know now is how to destroy the 
works of God ; as every land and nation has its appointed time, 
and the same process is being repeated on each in turn, so that 
history is one monotonous round, which will finally be put an end 
to by the Last Judgment ; so likewise the classical lands are 
physically dead, their natural condition has been disturbed, and 
their soil exhausted by over-culture. As regards Greece, such 
opinions do at first sight seem partly true. One German author, 
C. Fraas, declares modern Greece — which in its best days was 
thickly wooded, rainy, and watered by copious rivers — to be a 
barren waste, waterless through the uprooting of its woods, stripped 
of its upper soil, and left a prey to its burning climate ; a land 
incapable of profitable tillage, or any industry that demands timber, 
and therefore no fit abode foi an economically developed com- 
munity. Assertions like these are extended to the whole of 
Western Asia ; thus Babylonia is said to have been used up by 
ancient culture and irretrievably ruined. But disappointed hopes 
and indignation at ungrateful treatment have evidently biassed our 
author : he does not always quote the ancient authors impartially ; 
he passes over what did not serve his purpose, and puts a false 
interpretation on many facts. For example, the great cold com- 
plained of in the introduction to the " Vendidad " is no proof that 
the climate of Iran has become hot since those early days ; for 
the passage quoted is either a mere reminiscence of the original 
home of the Zends, the highlands on the western border of 
Central Asia, or it refers to one of the cold mountain regions 
not wanting within the limits of Iranian territory. The fact that 



20 INTRO D UC TION. 



cypress wood was used in building Alexander the Great's fleet on 
the Euphrates is not much to the point; for, from the earliest 
times of Phoenician commerce, cypress wood was considered 
eminently fit for ship-building ; and then who can tell us whether 
Babylonia was ever rich in heavy-timbered trees ? That Greece 
is less wooded now than it was in Homer's time, and earlier, is 
undeniable; but it is equally true that many mountain districts 
of the Peloponnesus have denser forests of oak and pine than 
when the country was thickly peopled and studded with towns ; 
and that Attica, in the time of Pericles and Alcibiades, was dry 
as it is now. Plato calls the Ilissus a " streamlet," and we are 
told that the once bare and treeless Attica was first planted with 
olive-trees by Pisistratus. The destruction of forests is a phase, 
but not the final upshot, of culture. When a community takes 
the first steps towards civilization on a virgin soil, the primeval 
forest must give way before the most pressing wants : there is 
no thought of choice or forbearance. Each individual draws what 
he wants from the unlimited treasure, which, like the free air, is 
open to all. At this stage the uprooter of the forest seems a 
benefactor and hero. And in those ancient times it was really 
more difficult to penetrate into the woods than we now imagine ; 
it was a work that demanded almost superhuman effort. Theo- 
phrastus tells of an attempt made by the Romans to found a 
colony in Corsica, which was frustrated by the impenetrability 
of the woods ; the new-comers were, so to speak, beaten back by 
the thicket. A passage in a work of Strabo is also instructive in 
this connexion : " Eratosthenes says (of Cyprus, but the precedent 
is typical) that, anciently, dense woods covered all the plains and 
hindered cultivation ; mining thinned them a little, then came 
navigation, which also consumed much timber ; but, all this not 
vanquishing the wilderness, every one was allowed to make a clear- 
ing and settle where he liked, and the piece of land thus reclaimed 
was promised to him as his untaxed property." And this last 
measure, we may add in the same spirit, was the first thing that 
created light and culture. The farther the forest receded, the 
more friendly did nature become, and the more varied her gifts of 
herb and fruit ; for the unbroken primeval forest had suffered only 



EX HA USTION B Y CUL TURE. 



a limited and uniform vegetation to exist beneath its gloomy and 
everlasting shade. Not until long after is this condition reversed, 
in obedience to the law of the three stages. The scarcity of wood, 
shade, and moisture awakens a regret for the departed freshness 
of nature; conscience, so to speak, is aroused; then the exist- 
ence of the forest within certain limits is intentionally secured ; 
or, where it is absolutely wanting, plantations are commenced, as 
is now the case in many European states. But before thoughtful 
husbandry can make good what preceding generations have 
remorselessly spoiled, there often sets in, from other historic 
causes, a period of ferality, when the land presents the appearance, 
here of being exhausted by culture, there of having fallen a prey 
to blind man-hating nature (e.g., by the accumulation of swamps), 
and that is the point at which Greece now stands. But at no 
time was that country damp and foggy, like England ; it was 
always close to Africa, and the ancients themselves kept goats, 
sank cisterns, and practised artificial irrigation. E. Curtius must 
have been led away by Fraas, when in the preface to his " Journey 
in the Peloponnesus," he takes such a gloomy and hopeless view 
of the physical condition of Greece. What matters it that philo- 
sophers like Plato sometimes describe the earth, and especially 
Hellas, as aged, a bare skeleton that once was clothed ? Plato's 
whole character is that of an elegiac idealist ; and Seneca, when 
he uses the expression, "senility of the soil," shows himself in 
this, as in other points, a precursor of Christianity. Is not there 
the same general impression amongst us ? do not we constantly 
hear it said that the climate has changed, that in the speaker's 
younger days people were stronger and healthier, the soil more 
fertile, and so on? The old sailor with whom Julius Frobel 
made the passage from New York to Chagres would have it that 
during his lifetime the trade-winds had fallen off in their 
punctuality. Times without number the approaching end of all 
things has been argued from the increasing wickedness of the 
world. Lasaulx, another Munich romanticist, not long ago 
prophesied the downfall of West-European civilization (which to 
him was the same thing as the fall of the Church), and actually 
installed the Slavs as heirs. Against these maggots of the brain 



22 INTRODUCTION. 



we have means of refutation that were not accessible to our 
ancestors, namely, the figures of statistics and the calculations of 
physical science. E. Curtius concludes with the words : " Part 
of these evils (caused by the destruction of woods) can be rectified 
by restoring the disturbed order of nature ; other damages no 
second culture can ever repair, any more than, in organic life, art 
can revive a power that has died oat." Pray, what may these 
irreparable damages be ? Moist earth can be laid in terraces on 
the hill-sides, stagnant rivers purified, dry heaths watered, plains 
that have gone to marsh can be drained, and forests, if protected 
from goats and the fires of shepherds, would soon, in that happy 
climate, cover once more the flanks of the mountains. What is 
there impossible to capital in all this ? and what powers are lost 
beyond recall ? The general conditions of nature, which man 
cannot master, existed in ancient times as much as now. The 
floods caused by a sudden thunderstorm, for instance, will always 
rush destructive to the vale, and with them carry trees and rocks, 
just as they did in Homer's time, and when they subside, leave a 
long pebbly waste behind; things of which there is no fear in the 
plains of Central P^urope, where rain often drips from the sky for 
days together. That which seems to northern travellers who 
carry an ideal Greece in their imaginations to be present decay, is, 
in part, the character of southern lands and climates in general. 
The evils complained of are inseparably bound up with all the 
charm and bounty of countries lying nearer to the sun. Besides, 
we must not over-rate the influence of forests on climate. As 
often occurs with new points of view, this one has beer, too 
exclusively applied. In the present case were also enlisted the 
sympathy of poetical minds, and especially the interest of the 
feudal nobility, who fought on behalf of large estates, who did 
not relish losing their hunting-grounds, and were happy to be able, 
for once, to join chorus with the newest doctrines of national 
economy. In real fact, the climate and atmospheric conditions of 
European countries, as a whole, do not depend on the vegetable 
covering of the ground at all, but, next to their latitude, on far- 
reaching meteorological processes that extend from Africa and the 
Atlantic Ocean to Lake Aral and Siberia. 



EX HA UST10N B Y CUL 1 'URE. 23 

Franz Unger, taking a wider view than Fraas, answers the 
question whether the East, as to its physical natural, is capable of 
regeneration, in the affirmative. He opposes the notion that there 
is any such thing as a senile marasmus of nature, and that civiliza- 
tion digs its own grave. You need only alter the men who inhabit 
the ground ; the ground itself has lost nothing of its creative force, 
and only requires forbearance and assistance. For instance, if 
the herds of goats could be diminished or fed at home, the under- 
wood would grow up into strong forest, and the driest mountains 
clothe themselves at least with bushes, without any artificial 
planting or terracing. Ere long the stone-pine and Oriental oak 
would cease to be the only trees that greet the traveller's eye in 
Greece. It is difficult to say how many generations must come 
and go before the East can be verdant again, but under those 
skies the generative and sanative powers of nature are marvellous. 
And, as with vegetation, so it is with other evils which the country 
has suffered since ancient times. Many harbours, for instance, 
used by the ancients are now blocked up with sand ; there are 
even finer harbours that were too large and deep for the small 
craft of the olden time, but are exactly suited to modern means 
and dimensions. Thus the question whether Greece, Asia Minor, 
Syria, and Palestine, countries now so utterly neglected, shall 
ever rejoice in a new florescence, will depend entirely on the 
course of world-history and culture; physical nature will place 
no insurmountable hindrance in the way. And the notion that 
those wretched countries are used up rests not on agricultural or 
scientific observation, but on false theories of the philosophy of 
history. 

From another and equally gloomy point of view the disciples 
of a new science — agricultural chemistry — have already passed 
sentence on the East and the Mediterranean countries, and 
raised their lament over the dead. Cultivation of the soil, they 
say, carried on for thousands of years, exhausts the ground and 
forces man to migrate to new countries. The materials necessary 
to the growth and ripening of plants, the alkalies, phosphoric 
salts, etc., are only present in a limited quantity on any given 
surface ; and when, from long successive harvests, the stock is 



24 INTRODUCTION. 



exhausted and the limit reached, the ground can bear no more 
fruit ; just as an exhausted mine yields no more metal. By the 
ground lying fallow, the minerals it contains have merely an 
opportunity of becoming soluble ; time, so to speak, only opens 
up the ground, but its power goes no farther. When once those 
minerals have been taken from it, lying fallow does the ground no 
good. The most careful farming only serves to further and hasten 
the chemical processes which the ingredients of the soil must 
undergo for the plant to get at them ; it cannot create new 
ingredients of the same kind. By manuring we give back to the 
ground a part of what we have taken out of it, but only a part, 
and in the course of centuries the deficit mounts up, till the 
field that once was richest will no longer reward human labour. 
Every harvest that is exported, every grain- ship that carries the 
produce of an agricultural district over the sea, is a direct 
diminution of the capital lying in the ground. What the towns 
consume is drawn from the country, and only comes back to it in 
small quantities or not at all. The refuse of men and animals, 
the leaves of trees, the dust of decaying organic life is blown 
away by storms, carried off by streams, and finally deposited in 
the ocean, the last grand receptacle. What London needs, the 
counties have had to yield, and by way of the Thames it is sunk 
in the depths of the German Ocean. As with London, so it was once 
with Babylon, with Rome, with the innumerable urban settlements 
of the ancient world ; the surrounding countries now lie prostrate, 
and there is no hope that they will ever revive, because by early- 
commenced and long-continued culture all the materials capable 
of transformation into vegetable life have been sucked up and 
carried away. If this train of thought be correct, the fate that has 
already overtaken the ancient countries lies in store for the whole 
earth. England will no longer bear a grain of wheat, just as her 
store of iron and coal will some time or other be exhausted. 
Mexico will still be fruitful then, but for that land too the day of 
eternal rest will arrive ; and so on through all the lands of both 
hemispheres. And the fate that is only hastened by the necessities 
of mankind must, even if man had never existed, follow as a last 
consequence in the natural course of vegetable life. Then — let 



EXHA USTION B Y CUL TURE. 25 

us add — all the mountains of the earth will be levelled by the 
power of water, wind, and atmospheric action ; and the sun, which 
constantly parts with heat, without, as far as we know, receiving 
any equivalent, will grow cold and dead, and with it the earth and 
its inhabitants. Fortunately we cannot even approximately calculate 
the date when all this is to happen, so we have a little leisure left 
us to find out if some link in our chain of reasoning may not 
prove untenable, and the whole prediction turn out a hoax, and a 
hypochondriacal chimera. For already, in more than one part of 
the globe, there have been discovered inexhaustible deposits of 
phosphorite, capable of fructifying the soil of whole countries 
for an indefinite period. Might not, in the nearer or farther 
future, the power of space-conquering machinery be so increased 
that new soil from such local accumulations could be carried to 
far-distant regions, and with it new energy of vegetable life? 
What may some day be accomplished in this direction is already 
possessed in part by the countries round the Mediterranean, in 
their mountainous and varied conformation, and the irrigation 
connected with it from the most ancient times. For while the 
rainfall in the corn-growing plains of the European forest and 
steppe region simply waters the fields without replacing the loss 
they have suffered, the torrents rushing from the mountains of 
the Mediterranean countries continually enrich the de-alkalized 
upper crust with the treasures of the earth's interior. A living 
example of this is Lombardy ; the rocky platform against which 
that province leans pours into it, by means of the rivers and the 
solid or dissolved earths they carry with them, ever new mineral 
nourishment, and keeps it as fruitful as it was two thousand years 
ago. And what nature alone could not accomplish was of set 
purpose completed by man, taught by necessity. In the East 
and around the Mediterranean, wherever the summers are rainless, 
vegetation was threatened with destruction by drought during 
the three or four hot months of every year. In these countries 
therefore, from the earliest times, the art of irrigation, the banking 
and diverting of streams, their horizontal distribution, the digging 
of canals, the making of dams and bores, of water-wheels and 
wells, were practised. So necessary was all this labour under 



26 introduction: 



the sunny skies, that it was continued from generation to generation 
until it became a second nature and innate skill. And as the 
art of irrigation was originally a sign of awakening reason, it also 
became a powerful stimulant to further mental development. It 
bound man to man, not by the stupid natural gregariousness 
common to beasts, but by free reciprocity, the first germ of all 
communities and states. North of the Alps this necessity ceased ; 
there the German settled where he liked, cared nothing for his 
neighbours, and developed his characteristic feature of personal 
independence. Even in the New World, where the two races 
met under similar natural conditions, this state of things continued. 
In New Mexico, for instance, the Spaniards had made miles and 
miles of canal for irrigation, which were afterwards neglected by 
the Anglo-Saxon immigrants, to the great detriment of the country. 
"This kind of cultivation," says Frobel, "is foreign to the 
inhabitants of the United States, and contrary to their indivi- 
dualizing disposition; for no large system of irrigation is con- 
ceivable without some legislation that would limit the individual's 
free disposal of his property." Even an American author remarks, 
that in American hands any agriculture depending on irrigation 
must always fail, "because the despotic rule of a community 
necessary under such a system agrees but little with American 
notions." To the Saxon race, therefore, all organized association 
seems despotic, whereas on the Mediterranean, from Bactria and 
Babylonia to the Pillars of Hercules, it was a behest of nature, and 
became a characteristic feature of the nations. But, apart from its 
politico-moral effects, irrigation does secure to the soil perennial 
youth, as long as mountains stand and waters run. Where field 
and meadow have nothing to look to but the rising and falling 
vapours from the ocean, that state of exhaustion, which anxious 
and perhaps supercilious judges attribute to the classical countries, 
must ensue much more rapidly. 

It was no inexorable law of nature that caused the decline of 
culture in the East, but the succession of historical events; the 
geographical position, which first favoured and then endangered 
human development; the collision of races, modes of life, and 
religions, and the accompanying contamination of blood and rage 



EX HA USTION B Y CUL TURE. 27 

for destruction. The home of the agricultural and town-building 
nations of Western Asia abutted on endless steppes and deserts, 
whence hordes of wild, blood-thirsty Nomads ever and again broke 
forth. Once, in very early times, nomadic Semites from the 
Caucasus must have penetrated to the Persian and Arabian Gulfs, 
and destroyed a civilization then extant, whose nature and duration 
we have now no means of ascertaining. Just as these invaders 
had begun to settle down on the new soil, there appeared the 
Iranian flood, which, perhaps contemporaneously with the first 
arrival of Indo-Europeans in Europe, split the Semitic world in 
two, and pushed on in separate waves, as Phrygians, Lycians, etc., 
till it reached the Mediterranean. From that time the two races 
strove against each other ; the Semites crowding together in huge 
despotic centres, round palaces adorned with statues, digging 
canals and handling the spade; the Iranians pasturing their cattle in 
natural freedom, divided into tribes and led by patriarchs, lying in 
wait to plunder, destroying or carrying off whatever they could 
lay their hands on. 

Gradually, by the influence of time and example, and by ruling 
over more civilized countries, part of the Iranians adopted a 
settled mode of life and a higher order of government ; while 
the otherjialf of this immense race — the Sacse and Massagetae, 
the Sarmatians and Scythians, and later the Alani and Jazyges 
— continued the old nomadic life on their immeasurable plains. 
This division into two halves is the antagonism between " Iran 
and Turan," between civilization and barbaric freedom ; the region 
of Iranian culture with difficulty defended itself against ever- 
recurring invasions of wild tribes from the heart of the steppes. 
Thus, before the end of the seventh century B.C., plundering 
Scythians overran the best part of Asia ; which raid, however, only 
lasting twenty-eight years, was soon forgotten as a mere episode. 
Cyrus indeed attempted to subjugate the Massagetae, and Darius 
the Scythians, but both without success. On the contrary, during 
the rule of the Seleucidae, mounted archers of Iranian race 
from the region of the Jaxartes — the Parthians — established them- 
selves in Media and Persia as far as the Euphrates. Then, in the 
seventh century of our era, the Arabs, fanatic sons of the desert, 



28 INTRODUCTION. 



came like a whirlwind, and tore up by the roots everything con- 
nected with religion — and what was or is there in the East nol 
connected with religion? Once more the Semitic spirit had 
mastered the Iranian, in return for what it had suffered at the 
hands of Medes and Persians. Yet, great as was the desolation 
wrought on the gardens and cities of Bactria and Media, on the 
Tigris and Euphrates lands, on Syria and Asia Minor, by the 
Turanians and Islamites — these nomad horsemen were, after all, 
of much the same blood, of noble origin and handsome figure, 
capable of culture, and unconsciously bearing within them the 
possibilities and needs of civilized life. Complete ruin, beyond 
hope of recovery, came only when the bestial races, which had 
hitherto lain concealed in the Altai mountains, around the Baikal 
Lake, and on the dismal highlands in the heart of the continent, 
forming a fit nomadic background to the Chinese empire — I mean 
the Turks and after them the Mongols — found their way south- 
westward into the Aryan- Semitic world. 

The first of the Turkish races that appeared in Europe was the 
horde of Huns ; and what impression their brutish exterior alone 
made on the western world may be seen by the descriptions of 
contemporary historians, and by the popular legend of the sup- 
posed "Tartarean" origin of these Tatars. Ammianus Marcel- 
linus, describing the rude customs of the Alani, formerly called 
Massagetae, adds : " They are for the most part tall, handsome men, 
somewhat like the Huns in their mode of life, but standing at a 
higher stage of humanity." In the sixth century a.d., Sogdiana and 
Bactria, on the Old-Iranian canal-traversed banks of the Jaxartes 
and Oxus, were already Turkish; thence, in the following cen- 
turies, all Asia was gradually overrun, desolated, burnt, and 
plundered, and the inhabitants murdered or led into captivity. 
Seljukian chiefs wielded the leathern whip, solemnly set their 
feet on the necks of vanquished Emirs, and then ordered the 
unhappy wretches to be hewn in pieces; Persian girls, with 
almond-shaped eyes and long eyelashes, were dragged into the 
dirty felt tents of their howling, mis-shapen masters ; and, from 
Lake Aral to the Mediterranean, ignoble Upper- Asian blood was 
mixed with that of the old civilized nations — a lasting element of 



EX HA US TION BY CUL TURE. 29 

moral degradation and mental impotence. Yet even the Turkish 
conquest seems but a small evil compared with the horrible 
cruelties that marked the path of the Mongols. Words are futile 
to describe what was practised in the East by this race of yellow, 
squinting jackals from the wastes of Gobi. We will quote only 
one example. When Tchingis Khan, in the year 1221, attacked the 
great flourishing city of Balkh, the Bactra of ancient renown, which 
possessed 1,200 mosques and 200 public baths, he was met by 
envoys bearing presents and provisions, and praying for mercy. 
The Khan, apparently pacified, marched into the city ; and then, 
on the pretence of wishing to count them, had the whole of the 
inhabitants led out into the fields in detachments, and there 
slaughtered : the city itself was razed to the ground, and to this 
day remains a vast field of ruins. The Turkish nations, which 
had come from farther west, were almost immediately won over 
to Islam, and thus became intimately bound up with the West ; 
and in the course of years, it must be confessed, they did not 
remain altogether insensible to the milder customs and inherited 
civilization of the people they had conquered ; but the Mongolian 
hordes were led solely by the instinct of destruction and murder, 
and the traces of their existence have not disappeared to the 
present day. Ever since their time the East has lain like a man 
mortally wounded, and has not the power to rise. So fatal to the 
oldest human culture and the happy lands in which it flourished, 
was their contiguity to the inhospitable highlands in the interior 
of the continent, the native home of a lower race with repulsive 
features and filthy manners. 

So, too, the Greek peninsula owes its ruin to the neighbourhood 
of Asia and the steppes of Eastern Europe, and to adulteration 
with foreign blood. The Bulgarians, a Turkish race, settled south 
of the Danube ; the wild Avars, also of Turkish origin, harried 
the provinces lying round the fortified capital ; and, five hundred 
years ago, the Osmans already ruled and wasted this foreland of 
Europe. The Germans, too, had made Greek soil the scene of 
their still unsatiated appetite for war and booty ; we need only 
recall the desolating raids which the Goths, on arriving at the 
Black Sea, undertook against the coasts, towns, and islands of 



30 INTRODUCTION. 



Asia Minor and the Peloponnesus. (Italy they mostly spared till 
after their first fury was spent.) The Slavs have permanently 
inundated not only the Danube regions and Thrace, but every 
part of ancient Greece itself, and given names out of their own 
language to its mountains, valleys, rivers, and towns. From the 
savage recesses of the mountains, Albanians poured down into 
the depopulated country; both races then adopted the degenerate 
Byzantine Greek imposed upon them by the church and the 
political rule of Constantinople; and with the remnant of the 
original inhabitants, so far as any such were left, they formed the 
present nation of the Greeks. Thus the barbarism out of which 
Greece is painfully struggling is explained by the abomination of 
desolation that has fallen upon her, and not by a pretended ex- 
haustion of the powers of nature, which are, no doubt, as effective 
now as they were in the days of her fairest bloom. 

THE OLDEN TIME. 

When the great Aryan Migration brought the first inhabitants 
of a higher race, that we are historically acquainted with, into the 
two peninsulas which afterwards became the scene of classic 
culture, those lands (we may imagine) were covered with thick, 
impenetrable forests of dark firs and evergreen ilexes, or decidu- 
ous oaks, similar to what is described by Homer : 

" Nor here the sun's meridian rays had power, 
Nor wind sharp -piercing, nor the rushing shower ; 
The verdant arch so close its texture kept;" 

interspersed in the river valleys with more open stretches of 
meadow land, grazed by the herds of the new-comers, and with 
many a naked or grass-grown precipice, climbed by the nibbling 
sheep, from whose summits here and there could be seen the 
waste, unfruitful sea. The swine found plenteous nourishment 
in the abundant acorns, the dog guarded the flocks, wild honey- 
combs furnished wax and honey, wild apple, pear, and sloe trees 
afforded a hard, sour fruit ; at the stag and boar, wild ox and 
ravening wolf the arrow sped from the bow, or the sharp, stone-tipped 
spear was hurled. Game and domestic animals furnished all that 
was needed : skins for clothing, horns for drinking vessels, sinews 



THE OLDEN TIME. 31 



and entrails for bow-strings, bones for tools and their handles. Raw 
hides were the principal material, and needles of bone or horn 
served to stitch them together. The osier boat was covered with 
hide, and the leathern coat was sewed together with the sinews of 
bulls : 

" Sew thee skins with thread of bull." — Hesiod. 

Spear and arrow-heads were fastened to the shaft with thongs, 
the draught cattle harnessed to the wain with leather straps, and the 
stick that urged the cattle was armed with a leathern lash. The 
beaver, which was eaten, was a much persecuted animal, and 
thickly peopled the lakes and rivers of all Europe. From this 
animal (Latin, fiber; Celtic, beber, biber) were named the Gallic 
cities Bibrax and Bibracte. The name soon disappeared from 
the Greek dialects, as the animal did from Greece ; on the other 
hand, it passed from Europe into the East. The wood of the 
yew tree (note 1) served for bows, that of the ash, elder, and 
privet for the shafts of spears ; wicker shields were woven of the 
willow. The gigantic trees of the primeval forest were hollowed 
by fire, and hewn with the stone axe into immense boats. On 
the wheeled waggon (note 2) — a machine of early invention, and 
built entirely of wood, with wooden pegs instead of iron nails — 
were carried the goods and chattels of the wanderer — his milking- 
pail, skins, and so on. The wool of the sheep was plucked out 
(note 3), and stamped out into felt covers and cloths, used par- 
ticularly to protect the head : 

"Over thy head 
Press the formed felt, thy ears to protect from the wet." — Hesiod. 

From the bark of trees, especially of the lime tree, and from the 
fibres of the stalks of many plants, principally of the nettle kind, 
the women plaited (plaiting is a very ancient art, the forerunner of 
weaving, which it nearly resembles) mats and web-like stuffs, 
hunting and fishing nets. Milk and flesh were the staple food, 
and salt a favourite condiment, but difficult to procure, and sought 
for on the sea-shore and in the ashes of plants (note 4). The 
farther south the easier it became to winter the cattle, which up 
in the north found but scanty nourishment beneath the snow, 



32 INTRODUCTION. 



and in severe seasons must have perished wholesale ; for the 
sheltering of cattle and the storing of dried grass against the 
winter are inventions of later origin, that followed in the wake of 
a somewhat advanced husbandry. The domestic animals were of 
poor breed. The pig, for example, was the small so-called peat- 
pig (torf- swine), far inferior to the animal now improved by culti- 
vation and commerce. In winter the human dwelling-place was 
a hole in the ground, artificially dug, and roofed over with turf or 
dung (note 5); in summer it was the waggon itself, or, in the 
woods, a light tent-like hut, made of branches and wicker work. 
Warfare amongst a cattle-killing race would of course be san- 
guinary, and punishments cruel. Rage, revenge, and thirst for 
booty were the prevailing motives. Cunning, ambush, and sur- 
prise, like that practised in the chase, were the forms and methods 
of war. Prisoners were slaughtered, as was the custom with the 
Cimbrians, and even the Germans of Tacitus ; slaves were muti- 
lated for greater safety, the victor drank the blood of his van- 
quished enemy, whose skull was at once his drinking-bowl at the 
banquet and a glorious trophy (note 6). Old men, whose fighting 
days were done, voluntarily suffered death or were murdered ; 
likewise those who were incurably sick (note 7). Human blood 
flowed copiously at religious feasts and sacrifices ; the chief was 
followed into his grave by his servants, wives, horses, and dogs 
(note 8) j wives were stolen or purchased, and the new-born child 
was accepted, or rejected and exposed, by the father. 

The powers of nature, whose presence was felt with dull terror, 
had not yet been embodied in any personal form ; the word for 
God, of which the Latin form is Deus, still signified the sky (as 
devas and its synonyms among the Finns, etc., preserve that mean- 
ing to this day) ; and while moral ideas were already developed in 
the Indian Varunas^ the process of personification had scarcely 
commenced in the Greek Uranos. Important or exceptional 
matters were decided by casting lots (note 9). Superstition and 
prognostics governed all action or inaction ; a conjuring spell 
could unloose the bonds of a captive or give supernatural powers 
to a weapon ; wounds made by the axe were cured, and spouting 
blood was stanched, by incantations. 



THE OLDEN TIME. 7.3 



11 With bandage firm Ulysses' knee they bound ; 
Then chanting mystic lays, the closing wound, 
Of sacred melody confess'd the force." — Odyssey. 

As in the religious idea the transformation of the powers of nature 
into demonic personages was not yet complete, or had only just 
commenced, so forms derived directly from nature still governed 
Society : from the family tie and the patriarch's rule was developed 
first a narrow and then a more comprehensive coherence of the 
tribe (it is only by slow degrees that words like the Gr. polis, Lat. 
populus, Goth, thiudci) etc., rise at last into the domain of freedom, 
that is, into political ideas : note 10). Within historic times 
tattooing was a sign of noble lineage, and perhaps the relic of 
a very ancient custom, for it is found among widely scattered 
members of the great race, among the Geloni and Agathyrsi, the 
Thracians, Sarmatians, and Dacians, and among the Britons in 
their distant isle, who apparently owe their very name to the 
custom (Old Irish brit, Cambr. breith = variegatus), and Pict per- 
haps is only the Latin translation of Briton, the tattooed. 

In marshalling soldiers for war the numbers of the decimal 
system were already in use — a first approach to abstraction ; but 
the idea of thousand had not yet been conceived, for the word is 
wanting (note n). For the rest, the language was a relatively intact, 
many-membered organism, internally governed by vital laws ; 
such as, after thousands of years, is still the wonder and delight 
of the grammarian, but could only have grown up in the obscurity 
of a clouded intellect and a direct consciousness of objects, for 
with awaking reflection the rank overgrowth of grammatical forms 
and the paradisaical fulness of sound begin to die away. 

Such, so far as we can reconstruct it in our minds from a few 
of its general features, was the condition of these immigrant 
nations at the time of their dispersion over Europe. A compari- 
son is perhaps afforded by indications in the Old Testament of 
the first conquest of Palestine by Semitic pastoral tribes ; here 
the ""anaanites were met by savage aborigines, who were after- 
wards imagined as giants, and of whom some remnants still 
existed, when, quite at the last, the Israelites took forcible 
possession of the land of their forerunners and kinsmen. So the 

3 



34 INTRODUCTION. 



Aryan tribes in Europe may have found aboriginal inhabitants 
there before them, whom they either exterminated, or with whom 
they amalgamated : in the east the Finns, a very degraded race 
of hunters, who were unacquainted with wool, salt, and the 
wheeled waggon, and could not even count up to a hundred ; in 
the west and south the Iberians and perhaps Libyans, of whose 
state of culture we are ignorant. Another and still more instruc- 
tive parallel occurring in quite historic times is offered by the 
Turks in their march of conquest through Asia, and the settle- 
ment of that nomadic race in the wide tract of land it had 
overrun. Certainly the Turks — and this may somewhat limit 
the analogy — did not drive herds of cattle before them, but came 
riding on swift steeds, which carried both them and their tents ; 
and here the difficult question arises, Did the Aryans bring the 
tamed horse with them, or did they make acquaintance with it 
later ? We mentioned above, among funereal sacrifices, the 
horses of the deceased ; may not w r e have committed an anachron- 
ism? Humboldt says: "The Inner (Kirghis) Horde inhabits a 
part of the regions over which formerly roamed the Kalmuk- 
Turguts, who originally came from the Chinese frontier, and 
who, on the night of the 5th January, 17 71, about seventy years 
ago (now above one hundred), set out with their 30,000 yurtas 
to fight their way to the plains of Dzungaria, a march of 2,000 
miles. This migration of 150,000 Kalmuks, accompanied by 
their wives, children, and cattle, is a historic fact that throws great 
light on the ancient incursions of Asiatic nations into Europe" This 
remark of the far-sighted traveller (for which we would willingly 
sacrifice a dozen so-called Aryan idylls, however charmingly 
coloured) must not be forgotten ; but the waggons and herds of 
those Kalmuks were protected by troops of warlike horsemen, so 
that the march could be safely and uninterruptedly accomplished ; 
have we any right to imagine the earliest incursions from Asia to 
have been similarly constituted ? In what follows next, we will 
gather together the chief particulars of the most ancient historical 
accounts of the Horse, and thereby, perhaps, gain some proba- 
bility for or against the above view. 



THE HORSE 
(EQUUS CABA.LLUS.) 

The noble horse, the darling and companion of the hero, tr>e 
delight of poets (witness the splendid descriptions in the Book 
of Job and in Homer's Iliad) — that glossy, proud, aristocratic, 
quivering, nervous animal, with its rhythmic action — has his home 
nevertheless in one of the wildest and most inhospitable regions 
of the world — the steppes and pasture-lands of Central Asia, the 
realm of storms. There, we are assured, the wild horse still 
roams under the name of Tarftan, which tarpan cannot always 
be distinguished from the only half-wild Musin, or fugitive from 
tame or half-tame herds. 

It grazes in troops, under a wary leader, always moving against 
the wind, nostrils and ears alert to every danger, and not seldom 
struck by a wild panic which drives it full speed across the im- 
measurable plain. During the terrible winter of the steppes, it 
scrapes the snow away with its hoofs, and scantily feeds on the 
dead grasses and leaves which it finds beneath. It has a thick, 
flowing mane and bushy tail, and when the winter cold com- 
mences, the hair all over its body grows into a kind of thin fur. 
And in this very region lived the first equestrian races of whom 
we have any knowledge — in the east the Mongols, in the west 
the Turks ; taking those names in their widest sense. Even now 
the existence of these races is bound up with that of the horse. 
The Mongol thinks it shameful to go on foot ; he is always on 
horseback, and when he occasionally dismounts, he moves and 
stands as if completely out of his element. Before a Mongolian 
boy can w r alk, he is lifted on to a horse and clings to its mane ; 



36 THE HORSE. 



thus he grows up on the animal's back, and at last becomes one 
with it. This mode of living, continued for thousands of years 
from generation to generation, has given a distinguishing stamp 
to the physical form of the Mongolian. His legs are bowed, his 
walk is clumsy, and the upper part of his body leans forward. 
When in his tent, his restless, wandering eyes have the expression 
of those of a rider in the immeasurable steppes, always watching 
the horizon to detect the smallest cloud of dust. His riches 
consist in the number and size of his half-wild Tabun ; when he 
wants a young animal, he catches it with the lasso. The milk of 
the brood-mares is his drink and means of intoxication (great 
practice and strength are required to milk the mares after they 
are hobbled) ; horseflesh is his customary and favourite food. It 
is true that Buddhism has attempted to abolish the last-named 
article of food among the modern Mongols, and the pious Lama 
at least abstains from its enjoyment. The skin and hair of the 
horse are also useful to the Mongol ; out of the first he cuts his 
indispensable thongs, the latter serves for ropes and sieves, and 
he clothes himself with the skin of young colts. 

From the wide plains of that part of the world the horse 
migrated into the highlands of Northern India, the well-watered 
valleys of Turkestan, and the districts and deserts of the Jaxartes 
and Oxus. In those parts the Turkoman's horse is even now 
distinguished for its intelligence, strength, and endurance. With 
very scanty provision the Turkoman rides a hundred kilometres 
(sixty-three miles) without stopping ; attacks, plunders, and 
disappears, before his victims recover from their surprise. He 
often spends the night asleep on the back of his animal in the 
middle of the desert, which does not afford him one drop of 
water for his favourite. He loves his horse, Vambery tells us, 
better than wife or child, better than himself; it is touching to 
see the care taken of his animal by this rude, rapacious son of the 
desert ; how he clothes and protects it from cold and heat, and 
spends all he can afford on its saddle and bridle. In the eyes of 
the Kirghis too the horse is the very ideal of beauty. " He loves 
his horse," says W. Radloff, " better than his sweetheart, and a 
fine animal can tempt the most respectable and honest man to 



THE HORSE. 



37 



steal." But it must be remarked that the Turkoman breed, 
though pure in the main, has been largely crossed with Arab blood, 
and to this mixture owes part of its noble qualities. 

That the horse in its original wildness also roamed westward 
of Turkestan, over the steppes of the present South-eastern and 
Southern Russia, and to the foot of the Carpathians, seems likely- 
enough ; not so likely that even the forest region of Central 
Europe once abounded in troops of that animal. And yet much 
historical testimony seems to put the fact beyond a doubt. Varro 
speaks of Spanish wild horses; and Strabo writes, " In Iberia there 
are many deer and wild horses." Wild horses as well as wild 
bulls lived among the Alps, as we learn again from Strabo ; and 
Pliny tells us, not only in the Alps but in the north generally. 
Nor are the Middle Ages wanting in proofs of the existence of 
wild horses in Germany and the countries east of Germany. At 
the time of Venantius Fortunatus the onager — under which name 
may be understood the wild horse — was hunted in the Ardennes, 
as well as bears, stags, and wild boars. In Italy wild horses were 
seen for the first time during the rule of the Longobards, under 
King Agilulf (Paul. Diac. 4, n). In 732 Pope Gregory III. 
writes to St. Boniface : "Thou hast permitted to some the flesh 
of the wild horse, and to most that of the tame. Henceforward, 
holy brother, thou shalt in no wise allow it." So, up to that 
time, the apostle of the Germans had been very liberal, perhaps 
because in his native island he had been accustomed from his 
youth to the habit which appeared so horrible to the Italian 
at Rome. Among the benedictions of Monk Ekkehard of St. 
Gallen (about 1000 a.d.) to be pronounced over the meats served 
in the refectory of that monastery, one refers to the flesh of wild 
horses, which must therefore have been eaten by the pious 
brethren. An old German proverb says : " A foal taken from a 
herd of wild horses will sooner be tamed than a depraved man 
learn to be ashamed." In the " Sachsen-spiegel," where it treats 
of women's outfit and dowry, it is decreed that wild horses which 
have not always been guarded shall not be reckoned as part of 
such property. In a Westphalian document of 13 16, the fishing, 
game, and wild horses of a certain forest are apportioned to one 



38 THE HORSE. 



Hermann. Not alone in the time of the Merovingians, but at 
the end of the sixteenth century, wild horses would seem to have 
lived in the Vosges mountains, the wild borderland between two 
nationalities ; for Rosslin, in his account of Alsace and the Vosges 
(Strasburg, 1593), thus circumstantially describes them : " Horses 
that be of their kind much wilder and shyer than the stag; also 
much more difficult to take even in traps like the stag ; yet 
when they are tamed, which is accomplished with great toil and 
trouble, they make the very best horses, that equal those of 
Spain and Turkey, and surpass them in many things, and are 
hardier, for they are accustomed to cold and to coarse food, and 
are sure-footed, being as used to mountains and rocks as the 
chamois." If wild horses were thus found in the cultivated west 
and south of Germany, they must have existed still longer in the 
wild country on the Baltic, in Poland and Russia. In fact, 
we find innumerable proofs of this down to modern times. At 
the time of Bishop Otto of Bamberg, in the first half of the 
twelfth century, Pomerania was rich in all kinds of game, in- 
cluding wild oxen and horses. At the same period wild horses 
are mentioned as extant in Silesia, whence Duke Sobeslaus in 
1 132 " carried away many captives, and herds of wild mares not 
a few." It is known, and is confirmed by many literary allusions, 
that till the time of the Reformation, and even later, the woods 
of Prussia were inhabited by wild horses. Toppen's History of 
Masovia (Geschichte Masurens, Danzig, 1870) says : "In the time 
of the Teutonic Knights, wild horses and other game were hunted 
chiefly for their skins. In 1543 Duke Albert sent an order to the 
commander at Lyck, bidding him take measures for the preserva- 
tion of the wild horses." Proofs of the horse being an object 
of the chase in Poland and Lithuania are found far into the 
seventeenth century. As to Russia, it is sufficient to quote the 
remarkable words of Vladimir Monomach, prince of Tchernigov, 
who lived from 1053 to n 25. He says of himself, in his pos- 
thumous exhortation to his sons (preserved in the " Lawrentian 
Chronicle ") : " But at Tchernigov I did this : I caught alive and 
bound with my own hands from ten to twenty wild horses ; and 
as I rode along the river Ross (which formed a sort of boundary 



THE HORSE. 



between the Russians and the wild Turkish Polovtsy), I caught 
similar horses with my own hands." 

To form a correct judgment of such passages, it is necessary to 
weigh the following facts. In the oldest historic times the horse, 
among Europeans, was kept as it is now by the Asiatic nomads. 
It grazed at a distance from the settlements in large, half-wild 
herds {stud, A.S. stod, Slav, stado, O.H.G. stuof)\ and when a full- 
grown animal was needed, it was caught and broken in by severe 
methods, under which many a poor beast must have been throttled 
to death. The Old Norse saying, " Feed the horse at home, the 
dog abroad," was a later rule, giving much the same advice as the 
Greek proverb which has become naturalized among us: "The 
master's eye makes a fat horse." In earlier times the freedom in 
which young horses were bred must have frequently led to com- 
plete feralityboth in individuals and in whole herds; the former — 
for example, mares at breeding time — running away and getting lost ; 
and the latter, when hunted by wolves or persecuted by gad-flies, 
rushing panic-stricken into the wilderness, to become objects of 
the chase like stags and elks. The fact that in pre-civilized 
times Central Europe, as far as Spain, was covered with dense 
forests, makes the hypothesis that that region was one of the 
natural homes of the horse improbable, for this animal is a native 
of the steppes, needing wide grass-lands and space in which its 
speed could be of avail in escaping from the larger beasts of prey. 
'1 he very way in which some of those facts are recorded seems to 
point rather to horses gone wild than to those originally wild. 
When the Vosges horses, though with difficulty, do get broken in ; 
when Duke Sobeslaus drives home herds of wild mares from 
Silesia ; when the fishing, the game, and the vagi equi of a West- 
phalian district are assigned to Hermann, and the untended 
horses of an estate are not to be included in a bride's outfit — in 
all these cases we may suppose that only fugitive horses are 
meant. So the animals found in Pomerania by St. Otto, and in 
Prussia by the Teutonic Knights, may have been born in a wild 
state, and yet the progeny of merely fugitive mares; and this 
becomes the more probable the longer those regions had been 
the scene of war and rapine. It is still more likely that this was 



4 o THE HORSE. 



the case in Tchernigov. In that borderland, close to the nomadic 
hordes, the woods may well have been the refuge of fugitive 
animals. It must be added that the epithet "white," given by 
Herodotus to the wild horses that grazed about the lake out of 
which the Hypanis flowed, shows that they were sacred herds 
kept in a partly free state. 

Turning from the European chase to the steppes of Asia, the 
true home of the wild horse, we meet with the important fact, that 
the farther a country lies from this point of departure, the later is 
the appearance of the horse and its historical mention in that 
country, and the more clearly are the modes of breeding the 
animal seen to be derived from neighbouring nations to the east 
and north-east of it. 

In Egypt, to begin with the remotest member, no figure of a 
horse or of a war-chariot has ever been found under the so-called 
"old kingdom." It is only when the period of the Shepherd Kings is 
over, and the eighteenth dynasty with its campaigns has commenced 
(about 1800 B.C.), that we find both pictorial representations and 
the first mention in the papyri (so far as they have been deciphered) 
of the horse and of war-chariots equipped in Asiatic fashion. The 
conjecture that the pastoral tribe of the Hyksos had introduced 
the novel animal, and with it the new art of war, into Egypt, is 
very tempting, but remains unsupported by any historical proof. 
It may have been the kings of the above-mentioned eighteenth 
dynasty that first made acquaintance with the horse and chariot 
during their peaceful or warlike relations with Syria. The Egyptian 
name for chariot is almost identical with the Hebrew, and the 
Egyptian word for horse, sus, is a Semitic one. In Egypt, as in 
Asia, the horse was kept exclusively for war; not one picture 
shows that it was ever employed in domestic or agricultural work, 
for what little seems to point to such a thing we may leave unnoticed 
as being too doubtful. Achilles is thinking of war-chariots when 
he says of Egyptian Thebes : 

" The world's great empress on the Egyptian plain 
That spreads her conquests o'er a thousand states, 
And pours her heroes through a hundred gates, 
Two hundred horsemen, and two hundred cars 
From each wide portal issuing to the wars."— Iliad. 



THE HORSE. 41 



What the Egyptian himself thought of the use of the horse we 
learn from the following mythic story : " Osiris asked Horus 
what animal was most useful in war. When Horus answered, 
'The horse,' Osiris was astonished, and inquired further, 'Why not 
rather the lion ? ' Then Horus said, ' The lion may be useful to 
him who requires assistance, but the horse serves to scatter and 
destroy the flying enemy.' '' If we may trust Egyptian pictures, the 
lion was so far tamed by the Egyptians as to accompany Pharaoh 
to battle ; it was chained to the chariot and let loose at the proper 
moment. 

As to the time when the horse became known to the Semites of 
Western Asia, we are limited to the evidence of the Old Testa- 
ment — the Pentateuch, the Book of Joshua, etc. ; but when were 
these books written? There is not a piece in this collection that 
does not consist of different parts, or that has not passed through 
the hands of successive revisers. If some single written notes of 
the time of the Israelite Conquest were really preserved, they may 
have been interwoven into the narrative. As to the rest, the 
oldest biblical author, the so-called Elohist, whose book is cer- 
tainly not older than the time of the Kings, can have had no other 
source than tradition, which, in accordance with its nature, had 
been forming and reforming its material during long periods of 
time. So we cannot be quite sure whether any given passage of 
the biblical reports was inspired by genuine tradition, by later 
theocratic or national views, or by the spirit of descriptive poetry. 
Descriptions of the horse are not wanting in the so-called books 
of Moses, nor in the historical books. In Joshua, for example, 
chap. xi. 4, we read, " And they (the Canaanites) went out, they 
and all their hosts with them, much people, even as the sand 
that is upon the sea-shore in multitude, with horses and chariots 
very many ; " and the contents of such passages are confirmed by 
the song of Deborah, which must be far older than the foundation 
of the monarchy, and probably belongs to the thirteenth century 
before Christ. In Judges v. 22, we read, " Then were the horse- 
hoofs broken by means of the prancings, the prancings of their 
mighty ones; " and in ver. 28, "Why is his chariot so long in 
coming ? why tarry the wheels of his chariot ? " But in these 



42 THE HORSE. 



descriptions the horse is never mentioned as a domesticated 
animal ; it has no share in the wanderings and battles of the 
Children of Israel ; it is the warlike servant of their neighbours 
and enemies, prancing and stamping before the war-chariot or 
beneath the rider. As a war-horse, and as such only, it is also 
celebrated in the fine description in the Book of Job. In the 
household its place is taken by the ass. " Thou shalt not covet," 
says the Decalogue, the commands of which were derived from a 
relatively very ancient period, "thy neighbour's wife, . . . nor his 
ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is his." The horse, the chief 
object of rapine among mounted nomads, is here, very signifi- 
cantly, never mentioned. When we are told later that King 
Josiah abolished, among other heathen abominations, the horses 
and chariots that were sacred to the sun — this was a feature 
of the Iranian worship of the sun introduced from Media. 

No wonder that we meet with no mention of the horse among 
the Ishmaelites or Arabs, that southern branch of the Semitic 
race. Nowhere in the Old Testament do we find horses accom- 
panying the shepherds of the Arabian desert ; those people travel 
only with camels and asses, and the mode of warfare in the despotic 
kingdoms from the Tigris to the Nile is unknown to them. Quite 
in agreement with the above is the fact that the Arabs in the army 
of Xerxes rode only on camels. Herodotus writes, "The Arabs 
were all mounted on camels, which yielded not to horses in swift- 
ness." And Strabo informs us that in Arabia Felix there were 
neither horses nor mules : " There is a superfluity of domestic 
animals and herds, with the exception of horses, mules, and swine." 
It was the same in the country of the Nabathsei : " There are no 
horses in the country ; their place is supplied by camels." And 
surely Strabo, the friend and companion of ^Elius Gallus, who led 
the grand but unfortunate expedition into the heart of Arabia, was 
as well informed about the peninsula as any one living at that 
time. Again, at the battle of Magnesia, Antiochus the Great, 
like Xerxes, led Arabs mounted on dromedaries. 

Those who find these ancient reports incredible, because Arab 
horses are now considered the noblest of the species, forget the fact 
that similar cases, so far from being rare, are very common indeed 



THE HORSE. 



43 



in the history of culture. In the sand-seas of Arabia, where 
oases form the islands, the camel, that ship of the desert, was of 
greater use than a horse ; it could move as swiftly as the latter, 
and go for a long time without water ; it fed on the herbs of the 
desert, and carried on its broad back the women and children, the 
tents and provisions of the wandering nomads. 

To the above direct evidence we may add the negative testimony 
of Publius Vegetius, a later compiler. He numbers and describes 
all the different equine races known to the ancients, but says 
nothing about Arab horses. Of African horses, which we might 
have supposed akin to the Arabian breed, he says they were used 
in the circus as being the fleetest, but he adds that they were of 
Spanish blood. An embassy was sent from Antioch to buy up 
race-horses, not in near Arabia but in distant Spain, and was pro- 
vided by Symmachus with a letter of introduction to a Spanish 
horsebreeder. An older contemporary of Symmachus, however, 
Am. Marcellinus, in the latter half of the fourth century, mentions 
the fleet horses and slender camels of the Saracens, whose 
country he imagines as extending from the Tigris to. the cataracts 
of the Nile. At about the same time the Emperor Valens pos- 
sessed Saracen cavalry, which he sent against the Goths who were 
desolating the land. Here then is evidence that in the last days 
of antiquity and the dawn of the Middle Ages, the Arab horse, if 
not then introduced for the first time, must have grown, under 
careful handling and a favourable climate, into the noble and 
beautiful animal we now admire. The Arab horse is already 
spoken of with affectionate partiality, and used in similes both in 
the Koran and in fragments of pre-Islamite poetry, supposing 
these to be preserved in a genuine form. 

Turning to the Eastern Semites, the Babylonians and Assyrians 
in the region of the Euphrates and Tigris, we find on the walls of 
excavated palaces numerous and vivid representations of the war- 
chariot drawn by richly caparisoned horses. (Layard's "Nine- 
veh.") It was no doubt from this region that the new engine of 
war travelled westward and south-westward to the Syrians on the 
Mediterranean and the Egyptians in the valley of the Nile. It 
must have been in the plains of Mesopotamia that the application 



44 THE HORSE. 



of the chariot to swift attack and as swift retreat for the archer 
was invented. Wherever, in the sculptures of Nineveh, we meet 
with a rider armed with bow-and-arrow, his horse is invariably led 
by another horseman ; if the former wields the spear instead of 
the bow, he has no assistant. The archer was obliged to have 
both hands free in order to clutch at the quiver, bend the bow, and 
send the arrow straight at the mark ; for the Assyrian had not yet 
become so entirely one with his animal as the Parthian was later 
on, and the Turkoman is now. Therefore he had recourse to a 
second horseman, and afterwards to the light two-wheeled chariot, 
drawn by two horses and holding two men. In this chariot the 
warrior stood erect, looking freely around, with his driver by his 
side. In the very act of flight he could turn round and still let 
fly at the pursuing enemy. But even in the Assyrian wars, chariot- 
fighting seems to have been a prerogative of the rich, as was, in 
other times and among other nations, fighting on horseback. An 
Assyrian king is never represented on foot nor on horseback, but 
always in a chariot, except when besieging a fortress, where 
rapidity of movement was no desideratum. Only two horses were 
actually harnessed to the chariot, but a third, and sometimes a 
fourth, ran loose at the side, ready to replace the former if wounded 
or otherwise disabled. The horses in these pictures are, like the 
men, represented in a highly conventional form ; yet Place, the 
author of " Nineveh and Assyria," asserts that among the modern 
Kurds, an Iranic race, he found very similarly shaped animals. 
And all the circumstances point to the Semitic horse having come 
from Iranian countries, just as the Egyptian horse came from Semitic 
countries. Thus the prophet Ezekiel informs us (xxvii. 14) that 
Tyre procured her horses from Togarmah, that is, from Armenia 
and Cappadocia : " They of the house of Togarmah traded in thy 
fairs with horses and horsemen and mules." 

Lower down to the south-east, in India, we visibly get farther 
away from the centre of the circle described by the propagation of 
the horse. In India horses were neither frequent, nor beautiful, 
nor strong; they were introduced from countries on the north- 
west, and easily degenerated. The ancients not seldom mention 
this peculiarity of a country otherwise so rich in all natural 



THE HORSE. 45 



gifts; and the accounts of modern authors agree with theirs. 
But on the frontier, among the Vedic tribes in the Land of the Five 
Rivers (Panj-ab), the horse was highly valued. It was used in 
war and for sacrifice ; was never ridden, but drew the war-chariot 
However, just as other things prove that the life led by those 
tribes was not entirely original, but had been greatly influenced by 
western civilization, so we find that the Vedic war-chariot exactly 
resembles in all particulars that described by Homer, and both 
resemble the Assyrian chariot from which they were copied. In 
Carmania, west of the Indus, the ass was used instead of the horse, 
even in war; and in Persis, whence issued the founder of the 
Persian empire, the horse was almost entirely wanting, and the art 
of riding was unknown. Young Cyrus shouted with delight when 
he learnt to manage the noble beast at his grandfather's court, for 
in his mountain home it was unusual to keep or ride horses, and 
the animal was hardly ever seen. Afterwards, when he took up 
arms against the Medes and Hyrcanians, and had to face their 
swift cavalry, he recommended his followers thenceforth to " mount 
the steed and fly at the foe as if on wings." To the eloquent 
speech that Xenophon puts into his mouth on this occasion, one 
of his nobles, Chrysantas, responds approvingly; "and from that 
time," adds Xenophon, " no Persian gentleman ever likes to be 
seen on foot." Hence, as we are told in Strabo's works, there 
was inscribed on the tomb of Darius that the king had not only 
been a faithful friend, but the best rider, archer, and hunter. On 
this point, as well as in their form of government, their clothing, 
manners, and customs, the Persians copied their kinsmen the 
Medes, following the Babylonian model only so far as this was 
already established among the Medes. To consider the horse a 
sacred and prophetic animal, a sacrifice fit for the God of Light ; to 
picture the chariot of the great king as drawn by pure white horses, 
and the Immortals as riding on white steeds ; and to incorporate 
the word a$pa, "a horse," in compound names of heroes and 
inferior gods — all this is Median and Bactrian, and was adopted 
by the Persian faith. Strabo says, "The whole of the present 
form of war called Persian, the preference for archery and riding, 
the splendour with which royalty is surrounded, and the rever- 



46 THE HORSE. 



ence paid to the king as to a god — all this was taught the Persians 
by the Medes." Media was the land of horses; whence they 
spread throughout Asia. The former country was well fitted for 
the purpose, partly by its natural construction, partly by the dis- 
position of the inhabitants; it even formed the transition from 
Iran to Turan, that is, from the settled to the wandering tribes of 
Iranian blood. 

" Media," says Polybius, " is distinguished for its superior races 
of men and horses ; in the latter it excels all Asia, and for this 
reason the royal studs were established there." Strabo praises the 
Median and Armenian breed of horses : " Both lands are excep- 
tionally rich in horses ; there is a meadow-region, called Hippo- 
botos, through which travellers who wish to go from Persis and 
Babylon to the Caspian Gates have to pass. In this region, in 
the time of the Persians, 50,000 mares are said to have been 
pastured, but the herds belonged to the king." It was in Media 
that the celebrated Nisaean horses, famed throughout antiquity, 
were bred. According to Herodotus : " In Media there is a wide 
plain called Nesaion ; in this plain are bred the large horses named 
after it." Strabo says that these horses came from the meadow 
Hippobotos, which also he places in Armenia : " The Nisaean 
horses that, being the largest and best, are used by the Persian 
kings, come, some say from Media, others from Armenia. . . . 
Armenia is so blessed with horses that it is not inferior in that 
respect to Media, and the Nisaean horses used by the Persian 
kings are also found there ; the Satrap of Armenia sent every year 
20,000 young animals to the feast of Mithras." These horses were 
as swift as those of the modern Turkomans ; and Aristotle says in 
praise of the Hyrcanian dromedaries, that, when they once began 
to go, they even outran the Nisaean horses, the swiftest of all. 
These horses were of peculiar form, resembling the so-called Par- 
thian horse of the Asiatic Greeks in Strabo's time. Am. Marcel- 
linus had himself seen troops of warriors thus mounted. Nisaea 
itself occurs frequently as the name of towns and districts on both 
sides of the Oxus, and had no doubt only an appellative signifi- 
cance. The Nisaean horses therefore came, as it seems, from the 
frontier of modern Turkestan, a region whence issued, at all times, 



THE HORSE, 



47 



the nomadic hordes who invaded the cultivated lands of the East. 
There, as far as the Jaxartes or Tanais (both Iranic names of the 
same river), and beyond it, north of the Caspian and the Black 
Sea, to the European Tanais (Don), Borysthenes (Dnieper), and 
Ister (Danube), lived the equestrian nomads, Parthians, Massa- 
ge tse, Dahae, Sarmatae, Chorasmians, Scythians, and other tribes, 
called by the general name of Sacae. Ancient authors frequently 
describe the manners of these tribes with more or less detail. 
Herodian gives the following of the Neo-Parthians, against whom 
the Emperor Alexander Severus marched : " They not only use 
the horse and the bow for war, like the Romans, but they grow 
up from childhood in the use of them, passing their lives in 
hunting. They never lay aside their quivers, nor get off their 
horses, but use them constantly, either against enemies or the 
beasts of the chase." The Dahae rode through wide, waterless 
deserts, halting only at rare intervals ; and thus they invaded 
Hyrcania, Nesaea, and the plains of Parthyaea. The Sacian cavalry 
was the best in the Persian army. When Xerxes was in Thessaly, 
whose horses were esteemed the best in Greece, he instituted races 
between the native breed and those he had brought with him, and 
his horses proved to be far superior. The Sacian horses were 
remarkable for enduring the hardships of the desert. One that 
the Emperor Probus captured from the Alani, or a similar people, 
" was of very insignificant appearance, but could gallop a hundred 
miles a day for eight or ten days together." Herds of beautiful 
animals must have been kept by Scythian princes, as well as in 
Media, for King Philip, the father of Alexander the Great, took 
20,000 full-bred mares from the Scythians at the mouth of the 
Ister, and sent them to Macedonia for breeding purposes. The 
horses of the Sigynnae, a people that lived on the Caspian Sea, 
are described as resembling in many ways the wild tarpan of 
Tartary and Mongolia ; they were covered with hair five inches 
long ; they had blunt noses, and were so small that they could not 
carry a rider, but were harnessed to carriages instead, which they 
drew at a great speed. The Sigynnae were of Median origin, but 
their animals had either remained stationary at the earliest stage, 
or degenerated from it, while the rest of the Sacae had improved 



4 8 THE HORSE. 



theirs by mixture with the improved breed in the richer pastures 
and milder climate of Media. But this Median horse itself had 
originally come from Turan, the home of those north-eastern 
branches of the great Iranian stock, which, as far as the light of 
history reaches, are always found a horse-riding race. Now, as the 
cradle of the central Indo-Europeans (Aryans) must be imagined 
as situated in or near that region, we find ourselves again facing 
our main question — Were they roaming tribes of horsemen (like 
the ancient Turanians) that detached themselves from the parent 
stock and inundated Europe ? or did they, like the Assyrians and 
Egyptians, receive the tamed horse at a later period from their 
former home on the sources of the Oxus and Jaxartes ? 

That the Indo-Europeans were acquainted with the horse is 
proved by its name akva, which is found, with more or less variety 
of sound, among all the branches of that family ; as, for instance, 
in Sanskrit a$va, Anglo-Saxon esh, Old Irish ech, Latin equus, and 
many others ; it is only lost in the Slavic languages. The word 
is derived from the root afc, " to hasten," and was applied to the 
horse as implying its speed, perhaps in contrast to the slow ox. 
The conception of the horse as of a swift and fleeting animal ope- 
rates for a long time in many myths and in poetical language. 
The sun hastens through heaven, and therefore the Persians 
and Massagetse sacrificed the horse, as the swiftest animal, to 
the God of Day. Herodotus says of the Massagetae : " They 
worship the sun, and sacrifice horses to that god. The mean- 
ing of this sacrifice is the dedication of the swiftest of all 
earthly creatures to the swiftest of all divinities." Homer 
calls the sun "untiring," and the same epithet is applied to 
Notus and Boreas by Sophocles, while Pindar also describes 
the chariot-horses as " untiring." Mythically the horse is re- 
garded as one with the storm ; this comes out very clearly in 
the fable of Boreas fructifying the mares of Erichthonius ; and in 
Homer the horses fly without bending the ears of the corn, and 
skim the foam of the grey sea : 

" These lightly skimming, as they swept the plain, 
Nor ply'd the grass, nor bent the tender grain ; 
And when along the level seas they flew, 
Scarce on the surface curl'd the briny dew." — Iliad. 



THE HORSE. 49 



The horse is also called "stormy," "storm-footed;" "more 
rapid than the hawk," " swift as the bird." The horses of Rhesus 
" flew like the wind," and those of Achilles were " sons of Zephyrus 
and the harpy Podarge " (namely, the swift-footed ; the harpies 
are destructive blasts of wind) ; they " fled with the blowing of the 
wind; "and one of them says himself: 

" No, — could our swiftness o'er the winds prevail, 
Or beat the pinions of the western gale." — Iliad. 

^Eolus himself, the ruler of winds, is called Hippotades, i.e., son 
of Hippotes (horseman). In the pictures of the northern Edda 
also, wind and storm are represented as horses. Odin, the god of 
wind, is carried by his eight-legged grey horse Sleipnir. Winter, 
represented as a giant, builds a castle for the gods, and is assisted 
by his horse Svadilfari, or the north wind; but before the ice- 
palace is quite finished, Loki transforms himself into a mare — the 
south wind — and entices Svadilfari from his work, so in spring the 
work is still unfinished, and Thor smashes the giant's skull with his 
hammer ; and so on. In the German legend of the Wild Hunt, 
at the head of which rode Wodan on his white horse, we have 
merely the midnight storm transformed into a horse and his rider. 
The belief prevalent in Roman times, that on the coast of Lusi- 
tania mares were impregnated by the wind, may be connected with 
these ancient representations ; Varro, who first mentions it, calls 
it an incredible but nevertheless true fact. 

The horse being thus known to the aborigines, and dwelling 
in their imaginations as the emblem of speed, so that its very 
name was derived from that quality, we may imagine the animal, 
in relation to man, at three stages ; either as the mere object of 
the chase, which flew like lightning and was difficult to overtake ; 
or as an animal for riding, which carried the wandering nomad 
to his goal, encircling and urging forward the grazing herds ; 
or, finally, as harnessed to waggons, drawing the kibitka, and 
serving the purposes of migration. But the last is improbable, 
for in this case speed was not the desideratum, but rather 
powerful muscles and strong necks. The Scythians, though an 
equestrian people, are described by Herodotus and Hippocrates 

4 



5 o THE HORSE. 



as riding in waggons drawn by oxen, and the campaigns and 
migratory marches of the other European nations are spoken of, 
when first met with in history, as being accomplished in the same 
manner. When the Cimbrians lost the battle against the 
Romans, the women threw their children under the wheels of 
the waggons and the hoofs of the draught animals, while the men, 
not finding trees enough to hang themselves on, bound them- 
selves to the legs or horns of oxen, drove the animals in oppo- 
site directions, and were thus torn into pieces. The bullock- 
cart, as a remnant of very ancient tradition, still appears at re- 
ligious and political ceremonies at a time when all other things 
were greatly changed. Tacitus tells of the goddess Nerthus riding 
in a carriage drawn by cows ; so with the ancient Gallic goddess, 
whom Gregory of Tours calls Berecynthia. When a dead Goth 
was carried to the grave, his funeral car was drawn by bullocks ; 
Gothic and Merovingian kings were drawn to the people's assem- 
blies, and to all places where they appeared publicly, by oxen ; 
and in the same manner were conveyed royal and noble women. 
On the column of Antoninus two captured princesses are repre- 
sented riding in a cushioned carriage drawn by an ox ; near them 
marches a bearded man, his hands bound behind his back, 
escorted by two Roman soldiers. This is quite the rule ; women 
and children in the bullock- cart, the warrior on foot. Traces of 
the most ancient times are also found among the Greeks and 
Romans, where bullocks were the common draught animals. The 
invention of the waggon and taming of the ox must be thought 
of in one connexion. We learn from the touching fable of Cleobis 
and Biton, related to King Croesus by Solon, that the priestess of 
the Argive Hera used to ride from the city to her temple in an ox-car. 
In such a carriage Cadmus must have fled with Harmonia from 
Thebes to the barbarians, and founded in Illyria the town of 
Bou-thoe (ox-run). The ox alone was employed in domestic and 
field work, and harnessed to the plough ; a house, a wife, and a 
plough-ox formed the basis of a rustic household. 

" But, before all things, a house, a wife, and a ploughing-ox.' — Hesiod. 
Pie who has no oxen can move no weight, and says to his 



THE HORSE. 51 



neighbour, " Give me a pair of oxen and thy waggon ; " but the 
other replies, " My oxen have to work for me." A proverb says, 
" The waggon draws the ox ; " the same thing as our " Putting the 
cart before the horse." 

The ox, the fellow-worker of man, was as inviolable as man 
himself. " And this was the custom in Attica ; not to sacrifice 
the ox, who bore the yoke and toiled at the plough or waggon, 
for he too was a countryman, and shared the labour and toil cf 
man." A saying of Pythagoras runs as follows : " Lay not thy 
hand on the plough ing-ox." Among the Homeric Greeks the 
horse was used only in war, and in exactly the same way as among 
the Oriental nations ; it was not ridden, but harnessed to the 
chariot. Riding, of course, was not unknown to the Homeric poets, 
as indeed how could it be ? When the storm has shattered the 
raft that much-enduring Ulysses had made on Calypso's isle, he 
escapes on a plank, sitting on it as "on the back of a racer." 
When Diomed and Ulysses steal the horses of Rhesus by night, 
the former wants to carry off the chariot of the murdered king ; 
but, on the advice of Minerva, the heroes mount the animals 
instead, and hasten back to their ships. Under the circumstances 
described this was most natural ; how often they must have seen 
the boy who took the animals to water doing the same ! In 
another scene in the Iliad a man has chosen four swift animals 
from a herd grazing at liberty, and has to take them along the 
high-road to the town ; he mounts and leaps, while at full gallop, 
from the back of one to that of another, to the admiration of 
all beholders. With the exception of these few cases, from which 
we cannot infer real riding in the present sense of the word, the 
horse, in Homer, serves only to draw the chariot. The combats 
before the walls of Troy are conducted in just the same manner 
as those we see depicted on the walls of the palaces at Koyunjik 
or Khorsabad. The light war-chariot has one axle and two eight- 
spoked wheels, is drawn by two horses harnessed to the pole, and 
brings the hero up to his enemy, when he leaps down and hurls 
his spear or draws his sword. The horses wait till the moment 
comes to take their master back to his comrades. The warrior is 
accompanied by a friend and companion, who stands at his left 



5 2 



THE HORSE. 



side as charioteer ; while the one fights in armour with shield and 
lance, the other directs the steeds. Sometimes a whole squadron 
of chariots advances in line to the attack, as in the fourth book 
of the Iliad, where Nestor places his men so that the chariots are 
in front, the strong foot-men in the rear, and the weak in the 
middle ; giving orders that no charioteer is to press forward, or 
lag behind, for in that way, long ago, towns and ramparts had been 
forced : 

" Our great forefathers held this prudent course, 
Thus rul'd their ardour, thus preserv'd their force ; 
By laws like these immortal conquests made, 
And earth's proud tyrants low in ashes laid." — Iliad. 

The Trojans and their allies fought in the same manner as the 
Greeks, and there is no doubt that the whole form of war and the 
use of the horse itself had been borrowed from Asia. Ares him- 
self, the God of War, fights either on foot or in a chariot ; never on 
horseback. In the fifth book of the Iliad the wounded Aphrodite, 
in haste to reach Olympus, borrows of Ares his war-chariot and 
horses, which carry her swift as an arrow to the abode of the gods. 
Hence he is depicted on the shield of Herakles, standing on the 
seat of his chariot, lance in hand, before him his swift steeds, 
terrible to behold ; and Pindar calls him, " Aphrodite's brazen- 
charioted spouse." Even apart from war, Homer does not 
describe the horse as used for riding. Thus, in the third book of 
the Odyssey, we see Telemachus and Pisistratus driving right 
across mountainous Peloponnesus, from Pylus to Lacedsemon, 
standing in their chariot, not riding up and down the passes or in 
the pebbly beds of the torrents. Their harness and other appoint- 
ments are the same as those of the warriors on the plain of Troy ; 
beside the hero stands Pisistratus, holding the reins and guiding 
the horses. When Menelaus, in parting from Telemachus, wishes 
to present him with three horses and a chariot, Telemachus 
declines the gift, reminding the would-be giver that Ithaca has 
neither spacious racing-grounds nor plains ; " Not one of the 
islands lying in the sea is a fit place for driving the swift chariot, 
and Ithaca least of all." In such countries, therefore, the horse 
was useless. Again, at funeral games in the most ancient times 



THE HORSE. 



53 



there were no races on horseback ; the games at the funeral of 
Patroclus (Iliad xxiii.) consist in chariot-racing, boxing, wrest- 
ling, running, fencing, throwing the ball, shooting, and hurling the 
spear. On the chest, whereon were depicted the celebrated games 
instituted by Acastus at the burial of Pelias, the artist has not 
represented horse-races, but only two-horse chariots in mid career, 
wrestlers, boxers, discus-throwers, and runners. 

Those earliest times have only left us very conventional repre- 
sentations of the horse ; those of a later period, when art was in 
its prime, show, in the opinion of judges, the slender Oriental type, 
not an importation of the aboriginal type from the distant north. 

A few features of the oldest form of worship have yet to be 
mentioned as pointing likewise to Iranian influence. The Per- 
sians worshipped rivers by sacrificing horses. When Xerxes 
arrived at the Strymon, the magians sacrificed white horses 
to that stream ; and in Tiberius's time, the Parthian Tiridates 
conciliated the river Euphrates by sacrificing a horse. Even so 
the Trojans were accustomed to throw living horses into the 
eddies of the Scamander ; Achilles says to them — 

" Your living coursers glut his gulfs in vain." — Iliad. 

Off the Argive coast there was a spring of sweet water, forming 
a whirlpool in the middle of the sea. Into it the Argives, in the 
very earliest time, used to throw horses as a sacrifice to Poseidon. 
The Rhodians used, every year, to throw into the sea a team of 
four horses dedicated to the Sun. To sacrifice horses to the Sun, 
to regard white horses — a sickly, abnormal breed produced by 
cultivation — as being by this colour sacred to the God of Light, 
and then as gods' horses in general and as kings' horses, was an 
Iranian custom and religious fancy, which is found here and there 
in Greece, and even in Italy. Castor and Pollux, both Gods of 
Light, ride on snow-white horses ; so they appeared, clad in their 
scarlet mantles, when coming to the aid of Locrians at the battle 
of the river Sagra. They are wedded to the blithe and shining 
daughters of Leucippus, whose bright being is revealed in his 
name. Both yEschylus and Sophocles represent Day rising with 
white horses, and chasing away Night's dismal round. When 



54 THE HORSE. 



Exaenetus of Agrigentum returned home as a victor, he was accom- 
panied by his rejoicing fellow-citizens with three hundred carriages 
drawn by white horses ; and Camillus, after taking Veii, entered 
the city riding in triumph in a chariot drawn by white horses, 
which act was blamed by his contemporaries as an encroachment 
on the rights and glory of the God of Day. The Lacedaemonians 
sacrificed horses to Helios on the summit of the Taygeton ; which 
custom could not be Phoenician, for the Phoenicians did not use 
horses in their religious ceremonies. It was rather derived from 
the Iranians of Asia Minor ; and if the original Greeks really 
arrived at their future home riding the small, shaggy horses of the 
steppes, all traces of the fact had certainly disappeared before the 
earliest period known to us. 

It is not quite so with Thrace, a land lying north of Greece, 
and celebrated by Homer for its horses. Homer's account 
might indeed be purely mythical : Thrace might be the home of 
the horse as it was of northern storms ; the wild waves rushed 
down from the Thracian sea; the horse symbolized the storm 
and the white foam of the waves ; it was therefore created by 
Poseidon (Neptune), and used in the games in honour of that god. 
But the Thracian horses of the Epic look too realistic and his- 
torical to be merely mythical. The Thracians had anciently much 
intercourse with the nations of Asia Minor ; and Rhesus, with his 
horses whiter than snow, his chariot and weapons more fit for a 
god than a man, is copied from an Iranian spirit of light ; it is 
therefore in the darkness of night that he is despoiled of his horses 
and his life. Thrace, however, like Asia Minor, lies near the 
home of the northern horsemen, and the Thracian breed might 
have come straight from the country of the Hippomolgi (mare- 
milkers). And in like manner it is probable that the tamed 
horses of the Slavs, Lithuanians, and Germans were descended 
from those of their neighbours, the Iranian horsemen. — Of the 
Slavs, Tacitus expressly says they were not a horse-riding nation 
like the Sarmatians, that their strength lay in infantry, and he 
therefore prefers to class them with the Germans. Afterwards, when 
the Slavs had advanced to the Elbe and Oder on the heels of the 
retreating Germans, the historians of the Middle Ages mention 



THE HORSE. 55 



a worship of the horse as prevailing among them, which forcibly 
reminds us of that among the Iranians. They dedicate a white 
horse to Svatovit, the God of Light, and a black horse to Triglav, 
the evil one ; the latter horse is never ridden, but the former is 
sometimes mounted by a priest. Horses are prophetic of good 
and evil fortune, and the temples at which they are kept become 
oracles. In the legend relating to the origin of Bohemia, it is a 
demonic horse that shows the envoys of Libussa the way to 
Premysl, the chosen ruler. This contrast of light and dark, and 
the sacred character of the horse, as well as the name for God, 
dogu, must have been derived from the Sarmatian and Alanian 
neighbours. — Ancient witnesses describe the Lithuanians as 
drinkers of horse-milk : a custom which, though unknown to the 
Germans, had spread from the horsemen of the South-Russian 
steppes to the Baltic. Wulfstan tells King Alfred that " there is 
so much honey in the land of the Estes (that is, Prussians) that 
the king and rich persons leave all the mead to the poor, them- 
selves drinking the milk of mares." That this "milk " was dis- 
tilled and intoxicating, we learn from Adam of Bremen and 
Peter of Dusburg. In Lithuania, then, as among the Iranians, 
mares were kept in great herds, and driven together to be 
milked, to which process the animals gradually became accus- 
tomed, especially if they were led to drink at the same time. The 
milk was fermented, and became an intoxicating beverage much 
liked by the nobles ; from which last circumstance we may con- 
clude that the breeding of horses was an art derived from abroad. 
A note on Adam's Chronicle would seem to indicate that even 
the Goths in Sweden intoxicated themselves on mares' milk; but 
the milking of mares was never a habit among pure Teutonic 
races, and the annotator's "Sembi et Gothi" must, as Grimm 
says, have stood for Samo-getse. — The cult of the horse among 
the Germans has also some peculiarly Iranian features. Horses 
were sacrificed to the gods, drew the sacred chariot, and had the 
gift of prophecy ; the white colour was most sacred, just as among 
the Persians, Scythians, and other nations. Roman judges con- 
sidered the German horses insignificant and ignoble. Caesar 
speaks of them as small and ill-shaped, though inured to great 



56 THE HORSE. 



labour. Tacitus says they were not conspicuous for beauty or 
speed. Possibly the type of these horses was very similar to that 
of the horses of the steppes — "small, swift, and stubborn," as 
Strabo says of those to the north of the Euxine. The German, 
like the Slav, was much firmer on foot than on horseback, except 
perhaps a few tribes to the east, which had associated more closely 
with the Iranian inhabitants of the steppes. Turning to the 
other side of Germany, Procopius pretends that the horse was 
totally unknown to the Germans of the north-west, to the Angles 
settled in Britain, and the Warnes, whom he places on the Lower 
Rhine. " These islanders are more warlike than the other bar- 
barians, but they always fight on foot. They do not even know 
a horse by sight, and the animal is not to be found in Brittia. If 
one of these people come as ambassador or otherwise to the 
Romans or Franks, he is incapable of mounting a horse, and 
must be lifted on. So, too, if he would dismount, he must be set 
on the ground. Also the Warnes are no riders, but go on foot." 
At the period of which Procopius speaks, this is very improb- 
able, and perhaps the accounts he made use of referred to the 
marsh -lands of the north-west, a region impenetrable to horses. 
Instead of the Angles he should have named the Frisians, and 
instead of Britain, one of the river-islands of the Continent. But 
the Batavians, the inhabitants of the island at the mouth of the 
Rhine, were considered the very best riders among the Germans, 
accustomed to swim the Rhine on horseback in their armour. 
Ancient writers also describe the Caledonian horse as being small 
and insignificant, it was therefore related to the German animal, 
and represented the old Celtic breed, which, in Gaul, had long 
since been crossed and improved. Dion Cassius says of the 
Caledonians : " They have small, swift horses, but also go on foot, 
walking very fast, and standing very firmly in battle." So the 
Caledonians too were swift runners, as the Germans and Wends 
were in comparison with the Sarmatians; and cavalry among them 
was of secondary consideration in war. Rather did the horse- 
man need a nimble and strong foot-companion, who accompanied 
him, and came to his assistance at critical moments. This combina- 
tion of riding and running among the Germans is circumstantially 



THE HORSE. 57 



described by Caesar : " Tliere were (in the army of Ariovistus) 
six thousand horsemen, and the like number of very nimble and 
powerful footmen, whom the former for their own safety's sake 
had selected from the whole, and with whom they remained in 
communication during the battle. To these, when necessary, the 
horsemen retreated ; if the battle went ill at any point, the footmen 
hurried up ; if a horseman was wounded and fell from his animal, 
the footmen surrounded and protected him; if it was necessary 
to go quickly forward or back, the practice in running of these 
footmen was so great that they kept pace with the horses, holding 
on by their manes." Long before that time the Bastarnae were 
accustomed to mix such auxiliary troops among their horse ; and 
we learn from some reports that the Gauls, who resemble the 
later Germans the more, the farther back we penetrate into their 
history, did not rely on their cavalry alone, but supported those 
troops by powerful infantry. So, from Gaul to the mouth of the 
Danube, it was a general North- European custom. It is true 
that, now and then, we hear of a similar mode of fighting among 
the Southern nations ; but, as will be seen on closer examination, 
it was of a very different nature. The Iberians rode to battle 
two on one horse, and then one of the riders fought on foot ; and 
Diodorus says of the Celto-Iberians, that when they had fought 
on horseback with success, they jumped off and did astounding 
deeds on foot. The stratagem once used by the Romans in the 
second Punic war was similar. When Capua was besieged by 
Q. Fulvius Flaccus, and the Roman cavalry, being fewer in 
number, were on the point of yielding to that of the besieged, 
the centurion Q. Navius thought of the following means of putting 
an end to this shameful state of things; he chose the strongest 
and swiftest youths out of all the legions, and armed them with 
long spears ; these youths mounted behind the horsemen, and at 
a given signal sprang off, so that a battle on foot and on horseback 
was developed at the same moment : the surprise and the wounds 
received put the enemy to flight. Probably this stratagem was 
not an impromptu invention on the part of the centurion, but 
had either been seen or heard of by him among the barbarians 
or the Greeks. Alexander the Great is said to have invented a 



58 THE HORSE. 



kind of cavalry more lightly armed than the Hoplites, but more 
heavily than the regular cavalry, and practised in fighting both on 
foot and on horseback. Like Gustavus's dragoons, this doubly 
exercised troop was not a product of national custom, but of 
military art. We might fancy we found this compound system 
of fighting in the Odyssey, where it is said of the Cicones, a 
Thracian tribe : 

"All expert soldiers, skill'd on foot to dare, 
Or from the bounding courser urge the war;" 

but the expression "from horses" means, everywhere else in Homer, 
fighting/ww the chariot, and thus the tactics of the Cicones would 
quite agree with those mentioned in the Iliad. Then why is it 
expressly mentioned? Because it was something unexpected in 
a barbarian race? To our surprise, however, this Trojan and 
Ciconian chariot-fighting agrees with the war-customs which Caesar 
afterwards found in use among the Celts of Britain. Like the 
heroes before Troy, the Celts rolled into battle in their chariots. 
Caesar minutely describes their tactics : " First, they ride about in 
all directions shooting their missiles, and trying to throw the enemy's 
ranks into confusion. Then having crept in among their own 
horse, they suddenly spring from their chariots and fight on foot. 
Meanwhile their drivers retire, and stand ready, if the warriors 
are hard pressed, to offer them a speedy retreat. So they combine 
the speed of horse with the steadfastness of foot. Their practice 
therein is so perfect that they can guide or stop a horse when at 
full gallop on a steep mountain-side; and run backwards and 
forwards on the pole, or step on the yoke, and then return into 
the chariot again in a moment." Agricola witnessed the same 
manner of battle in the Grampians ; and Mela says that the 
chariots were armed with scythes, a point on which Caesar and 
Tacitus are silent. Other historians say that such war-chariots 
were in use among the Belgians, which leads to the conclusion 
that, during the great Celtic migrations in the east in the neigh- 
bourhood of Iranian and Thracian peoples, the custom had been 
borrowed from the latter ; and that after it had died out on 
the Continent, it was still preserved in the British Isles like so 



THE HORSE. 59 



many other ancient customs. The scythe-chariot was Asiatic j 
and driving into battle, as we have seen, was altogether a custom 
of Assyria, Persia, and Asia Minor. 

Poets, in their fancies about pre-historic ages, have sometimes 
raised the question whether riding or driving was the oldest. 
Lucretius thinks that for an armed man to mount a horse and 
guide it with the rein is older than to go to battle in a chariot ; 
and he may be right in this sense, that though the waggon in 
itself is a very ancient invention, yet it is a far step from the rude, 
lumbering ox-wain of early ages to the light, swift, elegant, metal- 
bound and two-wheeled chariot of the Assyrians. The use of the 
ox as a draught-animal might invite men to train the captured 
horse for a like purpose; but it was more natural to mount it, 
cling to its back with hands and feet, and ride it till it grew tired 
and willing. And, as we have seen, the horse was always a war- 
like animal, whose value consisted in speed, and the rider only 
thought of harnessing it to a lightly rolling vehicle, capable of 
holding himself and a companion, in order to achieve more com- 
pletely his warlike aims. 

If we take all the above data together, we find that nowhere 
in Europe, neither among the classic nations of the south, nor the 
North-European nations from the Celts in the west to the Slavs 
in the east, is the high antiquity of the horse and of its subjugation 
to man betrayed by any clear traces or undoubted evidence. Many 
facts, indeed, seem positively to exclude any acquaintance with 
the animal in early times ; for instance, the fact of the Homeric 
Greeks not riding, as they must have done had they possessed 
the animal from the first, but only driving, as they had seen the 
Asiatics do. We have therefore no ground for imagining the 
Indo-Germans (Aryans) in their earliest migrations as a horse-riding 
people, galloping over Europe with loose rein, and catching men 
and animals with horse-hair lasso. But if the horse did not then 
accompany them on their great march through the world, it 
must have been the Iranian branch, which remained near the 
original point of departure, that learnt the art of riding later ; and 
from whom did they learn it if not from the Turks, who dwelt 
next behind them, and in course of time drew nearer and nearer? 



6o THE HORSE. 



To those Turks, and to the Mongols beyond them, must be 
attributed the first capture of the swift, single-hoofed animal of the 
steppes, and the art of using it for hunting and war. When the 
Turks first showed themselves to the civilized people of the West, 
they were a horse-riding nation to an extent till then unknown, 
not excepting even the Scythians, Parthians, and other Iranian 
tribes. " The Huns," say the ancient historians (Suidas, Mar- 
cellinus, etc.), "fall at every step — they have no feet to walk, they 
live, wake, sleep, eat, drink, and hold counsel on horseback." 
Their animals were strong and ugly, and therefore must have come 
fresh from the steppes of Northern Asia. So Zosimus: "They are 
unable to set their feet firmly on the ground, but live entirely on 
horseback, even sleeping on their animals," etc. The steppe 
was the birthplace of the horse ; the yellow sons of the steppe 
tamed the animal, and, succeeding in that, founded their whole 
lives upon it. After that their creative power was spent, and 
when they rode to the west they could only destroy. If, as 
modern discoveries seems to indicate, Media either had an 
original Turanian, that is, non-Aryan population, or, being 
originally peopled by Iranians, was subjugated by immigrant 
Turanians — the fact would explain how Media became the 
cradle of horse-breeding and the art of riding for the whole of 
Western Asia (note 12). 

GREEKS, ITALIANS, PHOENICIANS. 

In the earliest twilight shed by history on the Greek peninsula, 
what we can discern is the following. The nation whose fame, 
under the name of Hellenes, afterwards filled the world, had prob- 
ably fought its way through mountain and forest from the eastern 
side of the Adriatic to Dodona in Epirus, with which place posterity 
connected its oldest recollections and conceptions of ancient 
worship and primitive life. Here was a halting point, and thence 
issued the two general national names : that of Hellenes, which 
prevailed more in the east ; and that of Graikoi, which clung to 
the west of the peninsula, and was accepted by the opposite 
Italians, but died away in the mother country. 

From Epirus the immigrant march, doubtless in avoidance of 



GREEKS, ITALIANS, PHOENICIANS. 



wild hordes pressing in from the north, crossed the pathless 
mountains to Thessaly, where we find a second but still very 
ancient Dodona; and thence extended over the neighbouring 
lands, the accessible islands, and the southernmost part of the 
peninsula, which is almost entirely surrounded by the sea. 

At a much later period, when the small tribe of Dorians, leaving 
its home on Parnassus, had victoriously overrun the Peloponnesus, 
the preparatory time of unstable migrations and mingling of races 
ceased, and the populations of the peninsula permanently took 
possession of the settlements in which history has since accustomed 
us to see them. 

Everywhere, before the true Greek age, we must imagine a 
former period of the Pelasgians, a name in which either a former 
age and elder civilization has been personified (the name probably 
meaning forefathers, the grey in age: note 13), or in which the 
memory of a branch of the same nation, which preceded and was 
afterwards absorbed by the Greeks proper, has been preserved. 
What happened to the Pelasgians, happened also to the early 
extinguished races which we may comprise under the name of 
Leleges (probably meaning selected, in another form Locrians), 
and which may be traced, as scattered remnants of Western Greece, 
across the islands to isolated points on the coast of Asia Minor. 
Like the Pelasgians they formed part of the first great immigrations, 
and were scattered, or subdued, or driven across the sea, by multi- 
tudes pressing on their rear. As far as we can make out, their starting 
point was Acarnania and the opposite islands (note 14). At this 
earliest period the division of the nations is not at all clear, and 
we find transitions on every side. Progressive civilization first 
created the contrast between Barbarian and Hellene. Races 
ethnologically akin, but which had stood still at earlier stages of 
culture, and whose dialect was no longer understood, seemed now 
to be of doubtful or foreign blood. Among such half-Hellenes of 
intermediate position were numbered the ^Etolians and Acar- 
nanians; farther north the Thesprotians and Molossians in the 
once Greek Epirus; and on the opposite side, the afterwards 
great and famous Macedonians, a name which signifies tall people, 
just as Minyse means little people. 



62 THE HORSE. 



These formed the connecting links to two widely spread nations, 
the Thraciaiis to the east and the Illy nans to the west, which in 
fact belonged to the Indo-European family, and were therefore 
not absolutely foreign to the Hellenes, but, by long separation and 
diverse fates, were already at such a distance that when the two 
met they had no longer any sense of kinship in blood or civiliza- 
tion. It is a matter of doubt whether these two great races 
followed south of the Danube in the wake of the primitive Greeks 
after these had penetrated into their own peninsula, or whether 
the latter pushed their way, fighting, past the former. Pott, in his 
" Inequality of Human Races," is of the latter opinion. It is of 
no small detriment to the elucidation of the early history of Indo- 
Germanism in Europe, that the languages of both those nations 
are lost to us for ever — languages which would have afforded a 
key for solving so many problems concerning the dispersion, the 
course of migration, and the successive arrivals of the principal 
members of that system of nations. For the Thracians, together 
with the kindred Getae and Dacians, and the Illyrians with their 
branches, the Pannonians and Veneti, form the central mass from 
which numerous connecting threads spread to all sides. They 
were closely allied to the Greeks and also to the Phrygians, and 
through the latter to the Armenians and the Iranian races ; with 
the last, indeed, they were besides directly connected through the 
Scythians and Sarmatians ; some not insignificant traces also point 
to a connexion with the Lithuano-Slavs and Germans in the north, 
and the Celts in the west. 

An important link in the chain of languages and nations being 
thus missing, we are reduced in our grouping of the same to 
isolated observations, which may be valued by different persons in 
different degrees. Of one of those languages a valuable remnant 
at least seems to be preserved in the Albanian dialect ; but this 
idiom exists only in its modern and much disfigured form, having 
been deeply influenced by surrounding tongues both in ancient 
and modern times. It is often doubtful what must be attributed to 
primitive affinity and what to foreign influence, and all this together 
has hitherto prevented comparative philology, which has enough 
to do elsewhere, from attempting any extensive excavation in this 
field, though perhaps it hides much that is valuable (note 15). 



GREEKS, ITALIANS, PUCE NIC I A, VS. 63 

The Thracians (the name seems of Greek origin, meaning the 
rough or mountain folk) had early experienced the effects of 
Asiatic culture, and their southern branches in their turn influenced 
the north of Greece ; the Illyrians lead us on the opposite side to 
the sister peninsula, Italy. There, under the name of Veneti, 
Heneti, or Eneti, the Illyrians had not only occupied the country 
at the mouths of the Po and other Alpine rivers, but, as many 
traces of names prove, and as direct evidence confirms, had ex- 
tended at a very early time along the whole of the eastern coast 
down to the southern point of the peninsula, without, however, 
crossing the Apennines. The Messapians and Japygians in the 
south-east of the peninsula, together with the neighbouring peoples, 
may also be reckoned as belonging to the Illyrian stock. 

Along the great pathway of the nations, round the Venetian 
Gulf, either pushing the Italo-Illyrians to one side and before them, 
or, vice versa, pressed forward by them to the south and south- 
west, the Italians proper advanced into the peninsula. This 
people, as is evident to an unprejudiced mind, had separated 
comparatively late from the primitive Hellenes. Among the sub- 
divisions into which it parted on the new soil, and which perhaps 
owed their existence to the shocks of successive intermittent im- 
migrations, the Latins settled in the plain south of the Lower Tiber, 
and on the adjoining volcanic hills. The Sabellians advanced 
along the ridge of the mountain-chain itself; the Umbrians ex- 
tended from the Lower Po and the plains skirting the Adriatic Sea, 
across the peninsula to the western coast ; and, close to them on 
the north-west, in the mountains that descend to the Gulfs of 
Genoa and Spezzia, settled the Ligyans or Ligurians, a non-Italian 
people. Whether the immigrants along the west coast of Italy, 
down as far as Sicily, found Iberians and Libyans settled there, 
whom they drove away or destroyed, is a thing more to be guessed 
at than asserted or denied. But the Umbrians, at a very early 
period, were split into groups and subjugated by a new inroad 
from the north ; the mysterious, but probably Aryan, Etruscans 
settled themselves firmly, from the Alps to the Tiber, in all the 
upper half of the peninsula, and became powerful on the sea, after- 
wards advancing even to Campania, until they were more and more 



64 THE HORSE. 



limited and weakened by the Celts, who, breaking in from beyond 
the Alps, took permanent possession of the plains of Upper Italy. 
But meanwhile the warlike, roving, and reiving pastoral nations 
of both Greece and Italy had gradually turned their attention to 
husbandry, and thereby taken the first and mightiest step on the 
path of humanity. That in the Greco-Italian period before the 
immigration, nay, that even in the heart of Asia, they had culti- 
vated the ground and fed on the fruit of Demeter, has often been 
asserted with more or less probability; but the proofs brought 
forward in support of the assertion are scarcely tenable. A com- 
parison of the names for spelt and barley only shows that at a time 
when the Greeks, Lithuanians, and Germans were yet united, certain 
grain-bearing grasses were known by names common to two or 
more nations. The language of a pastoral nation must naturally 
have been rich in names for plants and grasses. There is only 
one word-root (Grk. aro-, Lat. ara-, Lith. ar-, Goth. arj- y to ear 
or plough) that might be taken as proof of an acquaintance with 
ploughing and the plough, before the dispersion of the nations 
over Europe. The long migration from the regions beyond the 
Sea of Aral must have been interrupted by intervals of repose, 
during which, according to their longer or shorter duration, the 
beginnings, but only the beginnings, of the art of husbandry were 
possible. As soon as the love of change revived, the hard and 
tiresome labour of turning up the sod, so hateful to all pastoral 
peoples, was once more neglected, leaving behind it only a general 
acquaintance with the art. We may therefore presume that the 
Graeco-Italians were only acquainted with the half-nomadic hus- 
bandry still to be found among the Bedouins, the nations beyond 
the Volga, and elsewhere. The original plough was a piece of 
naturally bent wood, such as was sought and found in the forest, 
and still known as late as Hesiod ; while the different parts of the 
constructed plough, mentioned both by Homer and Hesiod, have 
quite different names in Greek and in Latin. We must infer that 
the plough was invented, or derived from a foreign nation, only 
after the separation of the Greeks and Latins in their new homes 
(note 1 6). The plant which they cultivated may have been millet, 
which was a kind of grain very early common to both East and 



GREEKS, ITALIANS, PHCENICIANS. 65 

West. Side by side with millet we often find the turnip and bean, 
two very ancient fruits, called by common names, and the plant- 
ing of which probably preceded the art of husbandry (note 17). 

However that may be, when the restless pastoral nations found 
a settled abode in the sea-bordered lands of Greece and Italy, 
when the old roving spirit sobered down into purely local flittings 
and fightings, then those 

"Who settled close to the sea, 
Or in the vale far from its foaming waves ; 
And, at the foot of the gloomy ravine, 
Turned up the fruitful soil " — Hesiod. 

must have been tempted by the rich black soil and favourable skies 
to cultivate corn. The Pelasgians became a peasant people, bend- 
ing their faces to mother earth, and gaining their livelihood by 
the cultivation of the ground ; goading the ox before them, and 
sweating under the " labour imposed on men by the gods " 
(Hesiod). The shepherd, who clung to the forest-clad mountains, 
rejoiced in greater freedom. Shy of work, and rapacious like all 
shepherds, he attacked the dwellings, fences, and barns of the 
husbandmen; and, on a small scale, the same conditions ruled 
which, on a large one, ruled between Iran and Turan, between 
the Gauls shortly before Caesar and the Germans, and afterwards 
between the Germans and Hungarians. 

Thus human wants led to solid dwellings, walls, and forts on 
the heights — protective works to shield the fields against the wild 
neighbours of the mountains. So in many parts of Greece, under 
the names of Ephyra (watch-tower), Larissa (more correctly Larisa 
— endowed with fat soil; Larisa is the daughter of Piasos = 
fat ; and in the Thessalian Larisa rule the Aleuades = thrashers, 
pounders), and Argos (fruit-plain opening towards the sea), we 
meet with solid settlements of husbandmen and builders from the 
dark to the historic ages. 

While the kindred nations in the north continued their un- 
settled mode of life, the Graeco-Italian races settled down com- 
fortably in their new and splendidly furnished home, waiting for 
the impulse that should rouse them from their natural dulness 
and launch them on an endless career of culture. This impulse 

5 



66 THE HORSE. 



was given by their contact with the Semites, a clever race in 
comparison with the heavier Aryan nature, rich in the power of 
abstraction and already far advanced in many arts of civilization. 
Sidonian Phoenicians, in company with Carians, had occupied the 
islands of the JEgaean Sea perhaps as early as the thirteenth or 
fourteenth century B.C. According to their custom, they had taken 
possession of small islands and isolated promontories along the 
edge of the continent, as being commodious and safe points for 
trade and manufacture ; from the more northerly islands they had 
crossed over to Thrace, and had there come in contact with immi- 
grant Phrygians ; they ruled in Bceotia and Attica (remember the 
legends of Europa and of the Athenian tribute to Crete) ; and from 
the island Cythera, a very ancient seat of Phoenician culture, they 
made good their footing on the opposite Lacedaemonia, occupied 
Corinth, where Aphrodite (the Phoenician Astarte) and Elis, where 
Herakles (the Phoenician Melkarth), were anciently worshipped ; 
and perhaps even went up the coast of the Ionian Sea as far as 
the iEtolians, Thesprotians, and Illyrians. At suitable places 
they carried on purple-fisheries and dye-works ; they dug mines;, 
and engaged in profitable commerce with the children of nature 
who lived around their factories, a commerce in which, after the 
fashion of the most ancient and also modern times, cheating and 
robbery went hand in hand. What the natives could give in 
exchange was naturally only the produce of their herds and 
forests, such as hides, wool, wood, wild honey, cattle, and sheep, 
also strong youths and beautiful maidens — that is, slaves. What 
they received was of many kinds : all sorts of trinkets that tempt 
savages — images, boxes of bronze or glass, ready-made clothes 
{chiton and tunica are Phoenician words), iron and other metal 
tools, knives, and weapons; the products of various handicrafts; 
the mechanics of masonry ; mythical stories, ideas of West-Asiatic 
religious symbolism and cruel rites of sacrifice. It is true that 
the foreign element, which must have been numerically weaker, 
was gradually absorbed by the nationality of the natives, and as 
a separate existence died out; it is true that after the Dorian 
Migration enterprising emigrants streamed out of Greece in re- 
peated sea-expeditions, passing from island to island, then to 



GREEKS, ITALIANS, PHCENICIANS. 67 

single points of the Carian and Lydian coast, and thence again to 
others, even peopling and subjugating the once Semitic islands of 
Crete and Rhodes ; it is true that, during this period of a Greek 
occupation of the ^Egean, Phoenicians from Tyre no longer appear 
on the Hellenic shore except as merchants, and in single ships. 
But many ideas and much knowledge derived from them were not 
rooted out when they were driven away or assimilated ; they re- 
mained behind as a half-intelligible religious cult, as a national 
custom whose origin was soon forgotten, or as a valuable and pro- 
ductive possession in implements, inventions, and modes of culti- 
vation. Who shall decide whether the Greeks had brought with 
them the knowledge of the potter's wheel, of the loom and spindle ; 
or whether that knowledge was obtained from the Carians, Lydians, 
and Phoenicians (note 18)? whether the words denoting metals 
and many trade terms did not also originate among those peoples 
(notes 19 and 20)? Phoenician sanctuaries had been adopted by the 
Greeks and gradually transformed by the more liberal Hellenic spirit 
without ever entirely losing their original type ; Asiatic trees which 
surrounded the ancient places of worship, branches and flowers 
that had served as ancient symbols, continued to propagate in 
their new home. The wine that first came from across the sea. 
the sweet dried fruits, the fragrant oil, might take root and flourish 
in the land itself; and if some beginnings of such culture died 
out again in Hellas proper, they were revived by their own colo- 
nization of the East — they flowed back to the mother country 
from Crete and Rhodes, from Naxos and Thasos, and from the 
new settlements on the Anatolian coast. Semitic cultivation of 
the olive, the vine, and the fig found a home on the hills that 
bordered the sown field ; and the plantation that constantly re- 
quired a nurturing hand found a place beside the field that was 
merely ploughed with oxen, sown, and then left to the care of the 
heavenly and subterranean gods. As if by a miracle, a picture of 
the manners, occupations, and ideas of mankind at that period 
has been preserved to us in the Homeric poems ; but, full of light 
as that picture is, it leaves many riddles unsolved, and though it 
seems to bear faithful witness, it must be accepted with great 
caution. For in the epics of Homer and Hesiod all is not equally 



68 THE HORSE. 



valuable ; naive songs with genuine legendary contents and the 
clever work of later revisers and imitators, poems full of antique 
faith and later productions of profane rhapsodic skill, are more or 
less deftly, and with more or less probability, all enclosed in one 
frame. It is necessary to fix our eyes upon the most ancient 
portions as far as they can be recognised ; what lies behind Homer 
is wrapt in an obscurity which is only now and then illuminated 
by some passing ray from the science of language or from the 
religious myth. 



THE VINE. 

(VITIS VINIFERA.) 

We find wine in general use among the Greeks of Homer, and in 
that poet's works wine is looked upon as a natural gift of the 
country. Calypso, on the departure of Ulysses, gives him bread, 
wine, and clothes, the three first necessaries of life. In bread 
and wine lie the strength of men, and the gods are distinguished 
from mortals by their needing no food and drinking no wine. 
Little children are reared on wine; Phoenix the son of Amyntor 
gives food and drink to the infant Achilles, cutting up his meat 
and holding the wine-cup to his lips : full oft have his garments 
been soiled by the boy bringing up in childish fashion what he has 
drunk. Young ladies and their maids drink like the men ; when 
Nausicaa goes to wash linen on the sea-beach, her mother provides 
her not only with meats and cates, but also with wine in a goat- 
skin (note 21). 

In the eighteenth book of the Iliad we find figured on 
Achilles' shield, not only fallow-fields and crops ripe for the 
harvest, with other scenes of rural life, but also a vineyard in 
which the vintage is being joyfully gathered. As with the Greeks, 
so with the Trojans : Hector, encamping with his hosts on the 
river-side, causes the horses to be unharnessed and fed, and oxen 
and sheep and delicious wine to be brought for the men. Grecian 
towns and districts are described as rich in vines. A number of 
ancient towns and districts derive their names from the vine and 
vine-culture. If we inquire at what place in Greece the cultivation 
of the vine was first commenced, the answer seems to be given in 
numerous legends relating to the origin of the vine ; but such 
legends generally melt away under examination into a mere mythic 
symbolism of the budding, blossoming, and withering of the 
plant, or of the antagonism between the novel fetters of civilization 



7o THE VINE. 



and the rude and free forest life of shepherds. In one legend, 
Southern ^Etolia is the birthplace of the vine ; there, a dog 
(Sinus, the hot season) bore to the son of Deucalion, Orestheus 
(man of the mountain), the end of a branch ; he buried it in the 
earth, and from it grew a vine rich in grapes ; therefore he gave 
his son the name of Phytios (planter), and the son of Phytios was 
Oineus, named after the vine. Exactly the same thing is told by 
the neighbouring Locrians as having happened to them; and their 
surname of Ozolse is derived from the sprouting of the first vine- 
stock. In the Iliad the ^Etolian Oineus represents the genial 
culture of the vine. He refused to sacrifice to Artemis, and was 
therefore pursued by the destroying boar. His brothers are Agrios 
(the wild) and Melas (the black, foul), that is, the goatherd, which 
name is the same in sense as that of Melantheus, the wicked goat- 
herd of the Odyssey. His son, the hunter Meleager, who saves 
his fortress from the besieging Curetes, is the husband of Cleo- 
patra ; Cleopatra's mother, again, is Marpessa (the female brigand), 
whose parents are Idas (the wooded mountain), and Euenine (the 
daughter of the ^Etolian river Euenos). So in the Calydonian 
legend of the wine-man as given by Homer, we see not only the 
rivalry of hostile races, but also that of the different modes of life 
they lead. In many other places besides ^Etolia, the vine was 
said to have been first created or given to man by Dionysus 
(Bacchus) ; thus, in the Attic demos Icaria, to Icarius, who is 
both father of Erigone (the Spring-born) and master of the dog 
Maira (the twinkler = Sirius), and a multitude of transparent 
legends, and of cheerful or awful festivals in different places, 
celebrate the memory of that god's birth, adventures, sufferings, 
and glorious deeds. 

But Thrace, more than all other places, seems the principal 
home and point of departure of the worship of Dionysus. There 
was situated the oldest Nysa, that mentioned by Homer : 

" Bacchus, and Bacchus' votaries he drove 
With brandished steel from Nysa's sacred grove. " 

Thence wine-laden ships came daily to the Greek camp before 
Troy (note 22); then Ulysses received from Maron (note 23), the 
priest of Apollo, and the son of Euanthes, that is, of Dionysus 



THE VINE. 71 



himself — the delicious wine with which he intoxicated the Cyclop. 
A remarkable passage in Herodotus mentions an independent 
and warlike Thracian mountain tribe, the Satres, who possessed a 
Dionysian oracle. The worship of that god penetrated into the 
interior of the country up to the Hsemus mountains. Doubtless 
this Thracian wine-god originated in the opposite Asia Minor, 
with whose customs and religions military inroads had early made 
the Thracians acquainted. The great invasion of Mysians and 
Teucrians, for instance, which Herodotus places before the siege 
of Troy, may have introduced Sabos-worship, the vine, and the art 
of fermenting the juice of the grape, to the wild Thracians, " the 
worshippers of Ares," for Mysia was celebrated for its wealth of 
grapes. The representations of a suffering and then triumphant 
God of the Sun or Year ; the heart-breaking laments and furious 
mirth with which the Thyiades celebrated his death and resurrec- 
tion ; the double character in which Dionysus and Apollo, or Ares 
and Dionysus, melt into one ; this, with all that holds of it, smacks 
of Phrygia and of Western Asia in general. 

In the Thracian, as in the ^Etolian myth of Bacchus, through 
all the symbolism of nature we get glimpses of a contrast in culture, 
of an antagonism of rival races. Homer's Lycurgus, who pursues 
the nurses of Dionysus in sacred Nyseion till the terrified god 
himself takes refuge in the depths of the sea, may indeed, like 
Pentheus in Bceotia, be an image of winter ; but, as " krateros 
Lyko-orgos" (the stern wolf-man), as a son of Dryas (the forest), 
as " andro-phonos " (man-slayer), with the ox-felling axe (note 24) 
in his hand, he is the bloodthirsty Thracian mountaineer, who 
affrights the peaceful vine-dresser by his- sudden attacks, and will 
not tolerate the new-fangled religious rites. In this sense we 
explain that passage in the Odyssey where Maron, the priest 
of Apollo, rewards the hero not only with gold and silver, but 
with twelve amphorae of wine, for protecting him and his wife 
and child : 

" Him and his house heaven moved my mind to save, 
And costly presents in return he gave, .... 
And twelve large vessels of unmingled wine, 
Mellifluous, undecaying, and divine ! "—Odyssey. 



72 THE VIAE. 



But the use of wine, and the religion that saw in wine all the 
fulness of nature, spread throughout Thrace, and with the 
Thracians it moved further south ; filled Macedonia, where the 
Mimallones and Kloddnes (bacchanals) raved ; reached Parnassus 
and Delphi, whence Apollo only by degrees dislodged his brother- 
god ; it passed on to Thebes, where Semele, the goddess of the 
earth (note 25) bore to Zeus her glorious son; to Mount 
Cithseron in Bceotia ; and, personified as Eumolpus, to Attica, 
and Eleusis in countless ramifications elsewhere. But this stream 
of culture, from the very first, encountered one originally identical 
but coming from the opposite direction, that of the Phoenicians 
or Caro-Phoenicians. The coast of Thrace was an old haunt of 
Phoenician colonization and commerce ; Phoenicians had first 
opened the gold-mines on Mount Pangaeus, occupied the isle of 
Thasos, rich in gold and wine, and thence founded emporiums on 
the coasts of Thrace and the Hellespont, which their successors 
the Parians had much difficulty in maintaining. Wherever the 
Phoenicians landed, they would tempt the barbarians to trade with 
them by offering the wine they had brought with them ; and where 
they settled permanently they would compel the aborigines to 
cultivate the vine. From Crete, a centre of Phoenician coloniza- 
tion, this culture and the legend attached to it found their way to 
the islands of the JEgsean, to Naxos, Chios, and farther still. Fr. 
Osann's " (Enopion and his Kin " shows that the diffusion of viti- 
culture through the Hellenic world was personified in the story of 
a Cretan family travelling by way of Naxos to Chios, which then 
becomes the centre of an improved culture, and of numerous 
colonies that propagate the vine. Now, according to a tradition 
as old as Hesiod, even the Thracian Maron of the Odyssey was 
a son or grandson of this (Enopion ; and thus the two branches 
or outlets of Greek wine-cultivation meet in one (note 26). 

That wine reached the Greeks through the Semites we learn 
from the identity of name (Hebr. yatn, Ethiop. and Arab, wain, 
Gr. voinos, Lat. vinum). The course taken by civilization makes 
it extremely improbable that the Semites should have borrowed 
the word from the Aryans ; that is, from the Graeco-Italians, for 
the Iranians have it not. Attempts to show from Sanskrit that 



THE VINE. 73 



wine was an original possession of the unseparated Aryan races 
have fallen through, and, in the eyes of the unprejudiced, only 
prove the contrary. The true home of the vine, which is the 
luxuriant country south of the Caspian Sea, was also, as far as can 
be historically determined, close to the cradle of the Semitic race, 
or of one of its chief branches. There in the woods, the vine, thick 
as a man's arm, still climbs into the loftiest trees, hanging in 
wreaths from summit to summit, and temptingly displaying its 
heavy bunches of grapes. There, or in Colchis on the Phasis, in 
the countries lying between the Caucasus, Ararat, and Taurus, the 
primitive methods of cultivation we read of in the works of the 
Greeks and Romans are still practised ; for instance, the dividing 
of vineyards by cross-paths running from north to south (cardd) 
and east to west {limes decumanus) ; the pitching or chalking of 
the amphorae, the burying of them in the ground, etc. There 
grow the spicy, orange-yellow wines of penetrating odour, and the 
precious Cachetian grape yields a juice so intensely dark-red that 
ladies write their letters with it. From those regions the vine 
accompanied the teeming race of Shem to the lower Euphrates in 
the south-east, and to the deserts and paradises of the south-west, 
where we afterwards find them settled, and developing the peculiar 
civilization which succeeded the Egyptian and long preceded the 
Aryan. To the Semites, then, who even invented the distillation 
of alcohol, who accomplished the gigantic abstractions of mono- 
theism, measurement, money, and alphabetic writing (a kind of 
mental distillation, on the threshold of which the Egyptians had 
halted), belongs also the dubious fame of having arrested the juice 
of the grape at the stage of fermentation, and so produced an ex- 
hilarating or stupefying beverage. From Syria the cultivation of the 
vine spread to the Lydians, Phrygians, Mysians, and other Iranian 
or half-Iranian nations which had in the meantime moved up from 
the east. Thus it entered the Greek peninsula from the north, while 
at the same time Phoenician commerce, Carian colonies, and also 
old Greek communities that had crossed from Europe to Asia, 
brought the wonderful invention, and in time the plant itself, 
direct by sea. At the time of the Homeric Epos and Hesiod's 
poems, its introduction had long been accomplished and forgotten, 



74 



THE VINE. 



the existence of the vine and of wine was taken for granted, and 
attributed, like all the blessings of life, to the instructions or the 
creating hand of a deity. 

The earliest voyages of the Greeks to the west must have intro- 
duced the intoxicating beverage to the Italian coast, for that wine 
came to Italy from Greece is proved by the word vinum, its neuter 
form being accounted for by imitation of the accusative voinon 
(note 27). The Greek sailors found a simple shepherd folk, on 
whom the foreign wine had the same stupefying effect as on the 
Centaurs mentioned by Pindar: "When the Pheres became 
acquainted with the man-subduing power of sweet wine, they 
hastily pushed the white milk from the tables, drank out of silver 
horns, and wandered helplessly about." That in Latium milk was 
older than wine is proved by ordinances attributed to Romulus, 
according to which white milk, and not wine, was to be poured 
out to the gods ; and Numa decreed that wine should not be 
sprinkled on the bier, which shows that wine was not yet in use at 
the oldest funeral ceremonies. For there was a time when the 
Romans only practised agriculture, and the cultivation of the vine 
had not yet been introduced. It is remarkable that in that country, 
as in Greece, legends of battles between the nations are connected 
with the introduction of the vine. A much noted legend relates 
that Mezentius, King of Caere, demanded of the Latins the first- 
fruits of their vineyards, or the first wine from the press; but that 
they vowed these things to Jupiter, and so won the victory 
over the wicked tyrant. The rule of the Etruscans in Campania 
and Latium was probably broken by an alliance of the Greeks and 
Latins ; and the faint remembrance of this victory got mixed up 
with that of the introduction of Greek viticulture and that of 
the institution of firstfruits to Jupiter Liber and Venus Libera. 
The 19th of August, the day of the foundation of two temples to 
Murcia and Libitina, goddesses of the harvest, now also became 
the day of the vinalia rustica, which was preceded on the 23rd of 
April by the vinalia priora, both feasts connecting the younger 
cultivation of the vine with the older cultivation of the field. It 
was natural that Jupiter should be the patron of the new gift, and 
that his priest, the Flamen Dialis, should consecrate the harvest ; 



THE VINE. 75 



for all fecundity and fruits of the earth were attributed to that god. 
The surname Liber, which makes him the god of wine, is a trans- 
lation from the Greek; the Greek genealogy, which made Bacchus 
a son of Jupiter, had not taken root in Italy. The vine soon grew 
so luxuriantly on the mountains of South Italy, that already in 
the fifth century B.C. Sophocles calls Italy the favourite land of 
Bacchus, and Herodotus calls the southern point of Italy the land 
of vine-poles — CEnotria. CEnotria was the land where the vine 
was trained on poles, in contrast with Etruria and Campania, for 
instance, where it twined round trees; or Massilia and Spain, where 
it was cut short and left without support; with Brundusium, 
where it spread roof-like over trellis-work or cords ; or Asia Minor, 
where it crept upon the ground. These different methods of 
training resulted partly from the nature of the soil, which was 
either rocky and hot or damp and rich in humus, partly from the 
want of sufficient wood or cane, and partly from the habits of 
those by whom the cultivation had been introduced, and the kind 
of grape they brought with them. The abundance of timber in the 
country afterwards called Lucania and Bruttium — also called Italia 
from the cattle-breeding connected with those woods— may have 
led to the general use of proper vine-poles, and the name CEnotria 
may have been given by those Greeks who were accustomed to 
train the vine freely on the ground or on trees (note 28). In the 
districts at the mouth of the Po the vinestock must have been 
introduced very early by Greek maritime commerce, although the 
low and damp ground seemed little favourable to its cultivation. 
Even Strabo was surprised at the co-existence of marshes and 
flourishing vines. The vine grew well near Ravenna, bearing the 
heat and rains, nourishing itself on the mists, and yielding abun- 
dance of wine, and the same is remarked of other northern grapes. 
Wine in Ravenna was cheaper than water, so that the poet 
Martial says he would rather possess a tank of water than a vine- 
yard, and complains that a cheat of a publican has sold him pure 
wine instead of wine and water. Picenum, where the geographical 
names and other things indicate that it was anciently connected 
with the mouth of the Po, is very early described as rich in wine. 
We read in Polybius that Hannibal cured the horses of his army 



76 THE VINE. 






with the old wine of that country, of which there was an abun- 
dance ; and long afterwards the wines of Picenum were still 
exported to Gaul and the East. There grew the celebrated 
Praetutian grapes, resembling the Istrian, and were identified by 
Pliny with the Pucinian grapes that grew on the river Timavus 
near Aquileia. The Picene vine had therefore been propagated 
from the old Greek times along the west coast of the Adriatic to 
the very head of that gulf. Polybius, who speaks as an eye- 
witness, praises the wine of the extensive and fertile plains that 
stretched from the Po to the foot of the Alps. Most likely the 
vine grew there already when the Celts invaded Italy, tempted by 
its southern wines and fruits. Martial speaks of the vine-covered 
slopes of the volcanic Euganean hills near Padua. The Rhcetian 
wines, that is, the wines of what is now Tyrol and Valtelin, were 
anciently celebrated. They really owe their immortality to Virgil, 
who considered them only second to Falernian wine; but perhaps 
he eulogized the Rhcetian wine because Augustus particularly 
liked it. Strabo joined in the song of praise, most likely echoing 
Virgil. The district of Verona, too, was celebrated long after for 
its wines. 

Cato was of opinion that of all kinds of culture that of the grape 
was the most profitable ; and during the last years of the Roman 
Republic, Italy had become such a wine country that the relation 
between wine and corn was reversed ; wine was exported, and 
corn imported. But the cultivation of the vine had also long since 
begun to cross the borders of Italy and make itself at home in the 
north and west. Columella quotes from an older writer on agri- 
culture, Saserna, the opinion that the climate had changed, for 
districts formerly too cold to produce oil and wine had now a 
superfluity of both. The truth is, the cultivation of these plants 
constantly spread northward, not because the climate changed, 
but through gradual acclimatization. In modern times — com- 
pared to the Middle Ages — the reverse has taken place; the 
cultivation of the vine has retired from the northern districts, 
where it had ceased to be profitable. Northern France, the 
southern counties of England, Thuringia, and Brandenburg, etc., 
once produced wine ; but with progressing commerce it became 



THE VINE. 77 



more convenient to purchase the wines of more favoured countries 
in exchange for the grains which their own soil brought forth in 
greater plenty and with greater certainty. But the introduction 
of the vine into France, occurring within historical times, and 
known to us from scattered notices, probably affords a fair picture 
of the processes by which it was introduced to the peoples in the 
interior of Italy centuries before. The first vinestock on Gallic 
soil was doubtless planted by the hand of a Massiliote ; the vine 
flourished on the hills around Massilia (Strabo). The mode of 
culture was the same as that common in Asia Minor, without 
props or poles. Then the colonists, spreading eastward and 
westward, propagated this industry along the coast. The natives — 
Ligurians, Iberians, and afterwards Celts — bartered the raw pro- 
ducts of their country for wine, just as in later times the inhabitants 
of Aquileia bartered their oil and wine for Illyrian slaves, cattle, 
and skins. At first it was only the rich that drank the Italian and 
Massilian wines, while the poor continued to use the national 
drink made of fermented grain. Gradually the new culture spread 
into the interior ; the more distant tribes learned to cultivate the 
plant themselves, and transform the juice of the grape into wine ; 
till at length the Romans, who were not only a nation of warriors, 
but of shrewd traders, began to be jealous, and in the interests of 
Italian exportation made it a condition of peace with the Trans- 
alpine tribes that they should abstain from cultivating the vine and 
olive. " Pretty specimens of justice we are ! " says Cicero, in an 
outburst of honest indignation (De Repub. 3, 9, 16). Even when 
the region between the Pyrenees, Cevennes, and Alps had become 
Provincia Narbone?isis, wine was still largely imported from Italy. 
This is proved by Cicero's speech in defence of Fonteius, who had 
actually ventured to levy a toll on Italian wines. 

Then followed Caesar's conquest of the whole country as far as 
the North Sea and the Rhine, after which Roman civilization, 
manners, and customs inundated the land. In the first century 
of the empire, Gaul appears already as an independent and rival 
wine country, with its own peculiar growths of grape and wine, 
though not without indications of a culture but recently adopted and 
still young. At that time Gaul stood in relation to Italy as Italy 



78 THE VINE. 



had stood in primitive times to Greece, and Greece before that to 
Syria, Phrygia, and Lydia. Gallic wines pleased the Italian palate. 
Burgundy was drunk, though not under that name. It tasted of 
pitch (as some Burgundy does now), and was indeed artificially 
treated with resin and pitch. It was much appreciated at home, 
but was also exported to Italy. Gallic varieties of grape, which 
had been produced by transplantation to new soils, were trans- 
mitted to Italy and propagated there. The virtues ascribed to 
these Gallic vines entirely consist in greater resistance to an un- 
favourable climate, productiveness even on poor soil, and endurance 
of cold, rain, and wind ; they all bear abundance of fruit, and 
yield a large quantity of must ; they easily degenerate when 
removed to another soil, and have therefore no stable character ; 
the grape called helvennaca does not thrive well in Italy, but 
remains small and easily decays ; the aroma of the Allobrogian 
wine is rapidly lost, and so on. It was owing to this want of 
durability that the wines of Massilia, which somewhat resembled 
the present Cette wines, were smoked in the Grecian manner ; and 
the Provence wines in general came into the market not only 
disfigured by smoking, but by the addition of herbs and spices. 
The ancients had recourse to all sorts of means, such as boiling, 
smoking, and mixing, because they were not yet acquainted with 
brandy, by which our sherries, ports, marsalas, and other southern 
wines are kept from spoiling. It was in the natural course of 
things, that during the empire the culture of the vine should not 
only become permanent in Gaul, but be extended to the valleys 
of the Garonne, the Marne, and the Moselle, though it did not as 
yet cross the Rhine. But, if not the vine, yet wine itself soon 
became known to the neighbouring Germans, who by their 
acceptance of this product concluded the fateful compact with 
Gallic-Roman civilization; while the more distant tribes, from 
their so-called sense of liberty, that is, from their adherence to 
the half-nomadic hunting and pastoral life inherited from their 
forefathers, refused to admit so suspicious a gift. (More than a 
thousand years later it fared with the Germans in Norway as once 
with the Romans in Germany — they were now the southerners 
who introduced wine, corrupted the people, and were therefore 



THE VINE. 



79 



refused admittance into Bergen by King Sverris). However, the 
cultivation of the vine in the Roman provinces threatened to 
choke the cultivation of grain to such a degree that the Emperor 
Domitian, in an excess of anxiety, ordered that half and more 
than half of all the vineyards outside Italy should be destroyed — 
which order, naturally, could not be carried out. Prohibition of 
the Oriental custom of castration being issued about the same 
time, Apollonius said that the emperor spared men but eunuchized 
the earth. In Ionia, and Asia generally, the execution of the 
above-named order was warded off by an embassy (note 29). But 
the cultivation of the vine in the provinces must always have been 
regarded unfavourably by Italy, for it is recorded specially of the 
Emperor Probus, that he permitted the provinces of Gaul, Spain, 
and Britain (according to others, Gaul, Pannonia, and Mcesia), to 
possess vineyards and make wine. So drinkers of Tokay may 
toast the Emperor Probus, who had a short reign, but is become 
a legendary hero — a sort of wine saint. 

Less eulogized in song, but not less important, is another pro- 
duct of civilization, introduced into Transalpine Europe from the 
south at the same time as wine — we mean vinegar: French, 
vinaigre (sour wine) ; Gothic, akeit (from acetuni) ; Anglo-Saxon, 
oced; Pol. Wall. Bulg., ocel> etc. The Russian and Lithuanian names 
for vinegar, uksus and uksosas, were derived from the Greek, that is, 
from Byzantium, though there is now no country with a greater 
partiality to everything sour than the wide tract from the Car- 
pathians to the Chinese Wall. Vinegar mixed with water was a 
common beverage among the Italian people and in the Roman 
camps, from which it may have spread into the barbaric countries. 

If we compare the present condition of viticulture with what 
it was in ancient times, we find that it has in some degree followed 
the general course of history ; that is, it has declined in the 
countries of its origin, and stands at the highest point of develop- 
ment in those countries where it was introduced the latest. When 
Western Asia, the cradle of the vine, was overwhelmed by nations 
of the faith of Islam, it was natural that a product, the enjoy- 
ment of which was forbidden to the conquerors, should no longer 
nourish. In all countries that came under Arab government — in 



8o THE VINE. 



North Africa, Sicily, and Spain — the cultivation of the vine 
declined, for the ruling class in their Semitic temperance were 
more addicted to the worship of water and cooling shade than to 
that of heating drinks. Some fanatical princes would not even 
tolerate the existence of wine ; for example, the Caliph Hakem 
II. of Spain, who caused almost all the vines in that country to 
be uprooted, leaving only about the third part of the vineyards 
standing for the sake of the ripe grapes, dried fruit in the shape 
of raisins, or syrup and grape-honey, the use of which was per- 
mitted to Mohammedans. What Islam could not quite accomplish 
in Spain — as the present sherry and Malaga wines prove — was com- 
pleted in Morocco. The Atlantic coast of Morocco was anciently 
a very productive and celebrated wine district, into which the 
vine had been introduced, not by the Carthaginians, but by other 
Phoenicians long before. There lay the promontory of Ampelusia 
(vine-cape), now Cape Spartel, and the ancient town of Lix, whose 
Punic and Punico-Roman coins have the bunch of grapes for their 
distinctive mark, and of whose inhabitants it is related that they 
nourished themselves on the berries of wild vines. Strabo says 
that the vinestocks of Maurusia were so thick that two men could 
not span them, and they bore bunches of grapes three feet long. 
Other historians mention the large production of wine, and con- 
sequent export, in this district. The culture must still have been 
going on in the Middle Ages when the Arabs arrived, for the town 
they built on the site of ancient Lix was named El-Araish (vine- 
yard). But now, in consequence of the Arab dominion, this ex- 
tremely fruitful country possesses scarcely any or no vineyards, and 
only among the free Shelluhs of the Rif has Islam failed to eradi- 
cate the forbidden drink (note 30). Modern Greece — after so many 
fatalities, after centuries of ethnologic and economic degradation 
— produces, with few exceptions, very bad wine ; the fame of her 
Chian, Lesbian, Thasian has long since evaporated, and the 
resinous Resinato — at which Liudprand grumbled so long ago as 
968 on his ambassadorial journey to Constantinople — is not cal- 
culated to revive it. Perhaps currants are only a variety of grape 
produced by degeneration. They are said to have come from the 
Isle of Naxos, and to have been unknown in the Morea before 



THE VINE. 



1600. It is remarkable that they wander, as it were, from place 
to place. They have disappeared from Naxos, exist no longer at 
Corinth whence they received their name, and are now only 
found in Patras, Zante, and Cephalonia. 

In Italy the Ostrogoth and Longobardian princes and nobles, 
like all barbarians, certainly cared more for the quantity than the 
quality of their wine which the subjugated colonists were obliged 
to furnish. He who drinks out of his vanquished enemy's skull 
at a banquet will like best what is pungent and strong, and, above 
all things, will desire to empty and refill his warlike bowl as often 
as possible. The Normans in the south, the German kings on 
their march to Rome, and their accompanying dukes, earls, barons, 
and men-at-arms were all famous drinkers, but no fastidious con- 
noisseurs. To this add the inalienable property in land, which 
kept the labouring classes ignorant and stupid, the everlasting 
and destructive invasions, and the insecurity and barbarism of 
life in general, which permitted no investment of capital for any 
length of time. Perhaps a few ecclesiastical proprietors made an 
exception, and the cellars of some venerable monasteries might 
now and then contain fine old wines ; but we must not imagine 
that the taste of the bishops and abbots of the Holy Roman 
Empire was very refined, for they, like the knights, were also the 
children of a rude period. They not only drank wine without 
water — in contrast to the "human" custom of the ancients — 
but generally liked it best when boiled with spice, berries, and 
honey, vinum moratum, claratiwi — a sort of mixed drink or 
claret ) that is sometimes mentioned by the ancients, but only as 
one of the secondary uses of the product that served for daily 
enjoyment. 

Having regard to these unfavourable conditions, we may well 
suppose that all higher culture of the vine had declined after the 
Roman period. When we read Pliny's lengthy treatise on wine, 
or the passage on the same subject in the first book of Athenaeus, 
we see clearly that the taste and wealth of the Roman nobles 
must have kept that branch of industry in constant activity. An 
infinite variety of wines was produced (" as the Libyan sands, or 
the waves of the sea," says Virgil), of which one kind was patronized 

6 



82 THE VINE. 



by this magnate, another by that. Eagerness to outdo one 
another led to ever new experiments, both in choosing the grape 
and in the treatment of the juice; fashions changed, but not 
more rapidly than the natural qualities of the plant. Thus, in the 
time of Augustus, the wines grown on the borders of Latium and 
Campania — made known to all the world by Horace under the 
names of Falernian, Massic, and Ca^cuban — were considered the 
finest in the peninsula; but Pliny reports that in his time, two 
generations later, they were valued no longer, which, he adds, is a 
proof that every soil has its appointed time. He had said shortly 
before, that Falernian was no longer so good as formerly, because the 
producers thought more of quantity than quality. Manufacturers 
of wine in Greece and Italy are now reproached with exactly the 
same thing. Under the prevalent system of farming, based on the 
natural production, the quantity alone is looked at. and that mode 
of cultivation is preferred which promises the greatest yield ; the 
vintage is carelessly gathered, ripe and unripe grapes mixed 
together, and, to produce the darkest possible colour, for which 
there is a general demand, the must is tapped too late, so that the 
vegetable slime and colouring matter contained in the skins of the 
grapes passes into the wine, causing the sour fermentation which 
commonly takes place in Italian wines before the end of the year. 
There is, besides, the high temperature prevailing during the pro- 
cess of fermentation in autumn, as well as the want of solid air- 
tight barrels and cool cellars. The temperature of the latter is 
seldom lower than the average temperature of the year. The 
mode of preservation common among the ancients was perhaps 
really more suitable to a warm climate than our barrels, with which 
the Romans first became acquainted through the Cis- Alpine Gauls 
and Alpine tribes, and which thence spread farther south (note 
31). The Oriental wine-skins have at least the advantage of 
entirely excluding the air, and of shrinking as the wine is used, of 
being easily packed, and also of serving for a couch or seat 
during a journey. 

It is universally admitted that in modern times the palm in the 
production of wine is due to Central and Southern France. 
Whilst Italy almost entirely consumes the thirty million hectolitres 



THE VINE. 83 



of her yearly produce, and has therefore little to spare for export, 
France, on the contrary, till the vine-louse began its ravages, pro- 
duced double the quantity at a money value of about 2,000 to 
3,000 million francs, and became the chief exporting country, 
supplying all parts of the world with the finest wines as well as com- 
mon table wines. The Department de l'Herault alone furnished 
on the average from 12 to 15 million hectolitres — three or four 
times as much as the whole kingdom of Portugal. It is a remark- 
able fact that vines now produce the best wines in places close to 
the northern limit of their extension, where the plant was only 
gradually and with difficulty, and last of all, acclimatized ; wines 
now famed over the world under the names of Burgundy, 
Johannisberg, etc. Here, of course, culture and technical skill 
have done their utmost ; and who knows what they might not 
accomplish if adopted in the original homes of the vine ? In 
this connexion, a fact that meets our eye in the first two or three 
centuries of the Middle Ages deserves serious attention. At that 
time, we find the Western world thought of the wines of Pales- 
tine as the strongest and finest \ just as we now quote the ports and 
sherries of the Pyrenean peninsula ; and this wine of the 
Phoenician-Philistine coast was greatly valued at the Byzantine 
court. It was the Arab invasion that put an end to its production 
and the commerce founded upon it. 

In ancient times the vinestock was carried to all the countries 
surrounding the Mediterranean ; has it now, we might ask, when 
civilization embraces the whole earth in an ever-increasing degree, 
spread over all parts of the world ? The answer must be in the 
negative. In the southern hemisphere, with the slight exception 
of Cape Colony, the narrow belt of climate in which the vine 
will flourish is not to be found. In the so-called New World the 
attempts to cultivate it with profit have had no great success. 
North America produces perhaps one million hectolitres, and 
native Californian is to be had in most United States hotels, but it 
is described as having no agreeable flavour. Wine, we might say, 
loves not the west, and clings to the neighbourhood of its old 
home. In some parts of Australia there are said to exist tolerably 
extensive vineyards, mostly planted by Germans, but the Australian 



b 4 THE VINE, 



Bordeaux is too heating, the Australian Moselle and Rhenish have 
no aroma — and so on. 

At two points only, and quite at the end of the Middle Ages, has 
the hand of man really extended the region of the vine, namely, 
in Madeira and the Canaries — which may in a sense be said to 
belong still to Europe and the Mediterranean. Prince Henry 
the Voyager introduced shoots of the vine from the Peloponnesus 
and Crete into Madeira; and Alonzo de Lungo transplanted vines 
from Madeira to Teneriffe about the year 1507. The wine yielded 
there by Grecian grapes became celebrated all over the world ; but 
lately the grape-fungus has destroyed this culture, and it is being 
revived with difficulty. But the cultivation of the vine in those 
islands is also interesting, because there it comes nearest to the 
climate of the tropics ; the vineyards even of Southern Persia and 
of the Cape are further away from the equator than the Isle of 
Ferro at 27 48' latitude. 



7 HE FIG-TREE. 

(ficus carica.) 

it is natural that we should take the fig-tree, " the sister of the 
vine," as Hipponax already called it, for our next subject. The 
real fatherland of the fig-tree is Semitic Western Asia, Syria, and 
Palestine, where it grows the most luxuriantly, and bears the 
sweetest fruit. The Old Testament often mentions the tree, 
especially in connexion with the vine, and is full of figures and 
similes taken from it To sit under one's own vine and fig-tree is 
equivalent to enjoying a peaceful and happy existence. In Lydia, 
wine and figs were so much considered the chief blessings of life that 
those who advised Croesus not to march against Cyrus rested their 
arguments on the fact that the Persians drank not wine but water, and 
ate no figs. Phrygia was also famed for its abundant fig-trees. But 
at the time and in the scenes embraced by the Iliad, the fig-tree is 
not yet found on the western coasts and islands of Asia Minor, 
still less then could it have been known in the mainland of Greece. 
The first Greek mention of the fig-tree we find in the Odyssey, 
and there only in passages which are evident interpolations. In 
the book containing the description of Ulysses's descent into the 
nether world, which itself seems to consist of various pieces of 
different ages, figs, among other fruit, hang above the head of 
tamishinGf Tantalus : 



o 



Above, beneath, around his hapless head, 
Trees of all kinds delicious fruitage spread ; 
There figs, sky-dyed, a purple hue disclose, 
Green looks the olive, the pomegranate glows ; 
There dangling pears exalting scents unfold, 
And yellow apples ripen into gold." 



85 THE FICTREE. 



These verses are repeated in a fragment, awkwardly foisted into 
the really antique description of the palace of Alcinous, in order 
to bring in also the garden of the Phaeacian king : 

" The reddening apple ripens here to gold, 
Here the blue fig with luscious juice o'erflows, 
With deeper red the full pomegranate glows, 
The branch here bends beneath the weighty pear, 
And verdant olives flourish through the year." 

And finally, in the last scenes of the Odyssey, a late addition, we 
find Laertes designated the planter of fig-trees. Even Hesiod 
knows nothing of the fig-tree or its cultivation ; but in the works 
of Archilochus (700 B.C.) we find it mentioned as the product of 
his native island Paros, in a verse that is probably not much 
younger than the last- quoted passage of the Odyssey. In later 
times Attica and Sicyon boasted of producing the finest figs ; nay 
Demeter herself rewarded Phy talus, who had hospitably entertained 
her in Attica, by causing a fig-tree to sprout up from the earth. 
That this gift was felt to be the forerunner of a nobler and more 
cultivated life, is proved by the name given to a mass of dried figs 
presented at the Athenian feast of the Plynteria: a name signifying 
that the cultivation of the fig was the guide to purer manners 
(note 32). Wine and figs became necessaries of life in Greece, as 
common to the poor as to the rich. As the Arab is content with a 
handful of dates, so a few dried figs sufficed the Attic idler who 
spent his day staring about, and, according to the season, lying in 
the sun or in the shade. The epithet philo-sukos (lover of figs) 
applied to Plato might have been equally bestowed on all Athenians; 
and the story of the Persian king Xerxes shows how proud the 
Athenian was of his country's production. Xerxes, namely, 
caused Attic figs to be set before him whenever he dined, to remind 
him that the land where they grew was not yet his, and that 
instead of receiving the fruit as a tribute, he was obliged to buy it 
from abroad. The city of Syko-phants (lit., fig-informers) defended 
herself from Persian thraldom, but, as that nickname reminds us, 
she could not escape the decay of her political morality, and the 
ruin that ensued. Into Southern and Central Italy the fig-tree 
must have been introduced by the Greek colonists. It is found 



THE FIG-TREE. 87 



interwoven with the legend of the origin of Rome, for Romulus 
and Remus are said to have been suckled by the she-wolf under 
the Ficus ruminalis — a feature of the legend that evidently owes 
its existence to the same symbolism that placed that showy and 
fertile tree in the Eden of the Hebrews (note 33). Under the 
Caesars the varieties and names of fig-trees had become so nume- 
rous, that Pliny thought the formative law which keeps a species 
permanent was evidently changing. As late as the reign of Tiberius, 
the finest varieties of the fig-tree were still being transplanted to 
Italy direct from Syria. As it was then, so it is now ; the fig, both 
fresh and dried, is the common and wholesome food of the 
Italian people, particularly in the south. Besides the kinds that 
bear fruit once a year, there is a variety that bears twice — in 
summer and in late autumn — the Ficus bifera. The ripe fruit must 
be eaten as soon as plucked, and cannot bear much handling. 
Cato used this fact as a striking argument before the Roman Senate, 
when he produced a fig from Carthage which was still perfectly 
fresh, saying, " So near to our walls is the enemy ! " But we may 
reasonably imagine it had been plucked unripe, and that time and 
pressure had matured it. Smyrna figs, now considered the best, 
were also known in Italy in ancient times, being sent there pressed 
in boxes as they are now. The Ficus duplex of Horace may still 
be found in South Italy, where the mode of treatment can be 
learned from actual sight better than from the words of ancient 
authors. As is the case with all cultivated fruit-trees, there were, 
and are, many varieties of fig, but particularly two kinds — one 
dark purple, the other green, still called neri and bianchi, the 
black and the white. The latter being sweeter are chiefly used 
for drying, the former are eaten fresh. In hot countries the fig- 
tree, with its gigantic leaves pendent from its gnarled and many- 
jointed branches, affords a welcome shade in the Greece and 
Italy of to-day as in Palestine of old. The wild fig grows 
picturesquely out of the chinks of old walls, in ruins, and on 
rocks. Its wood, spongy and brittle while new {inutile lignum), 
is said, when properly dried, to become as hard and firm as oak. 



THE OLIVE-TREE, 

(OLEA EUROP/EA, L.) 

Like the fig-tree, the olive is a native of the south part of Western 
Asia, and in this, its proper home, it was very early cultivated and 
improved by the Semitic races. In all parts of the Old Testa- 
ment we find oil in common use for food, for sacrifice, for 
burning in lamps, and for anointing the head or body. Towards 
the interior of Asia the cultivation ceases, for the olive-tree loves 
the sea and limestone mountains. Egypt also produced no olive 
oil. The wild olive was frequent on the Greek coasts of Asia 
Minor, in the islands, and in Greece itself, and we find it often 
mentioned in the Homeric poems. Its evergreen foliage, the 
great age it attained, its indestructible vitality, and its hard wood, 
which admits of a high polish, attracted the notice of the people 
and of epic legend. Thus, in the Iliad, Pisander's axe has a 
long, well-polished handle of olive-wood : 

"An olive's cloudy grain the handle made." 

The Cyclop's club is of the same material ; so, in Theocritus and 
elsewhere, is the club of Hercules. Ulysses built his marriage-bed 
on the stump of an olive still firmly rooted in the ground : 

" Full in the court 
An olive spread its ever-verdant head. 

I lopp'd the branchy head ; aloft in twain 
Severed the bole, and smoothed the shining grain : 
Then posts capacious of the frame I raise, 
And bore it regular from space to space ; 
Athwart the frame, at equal distance, lie 
Thongs of tough hides that boast a purple dye." 



THE OLIVE-TREE. 89 



The olive is evidently chosen for its stability, because it clings 
to the ground with far-spreading roots, and symbolizes the security 
of the marriage bond. A wild olive stands at the entrance of the 
cave where the Phseacians land the sleeping Ulysses, and is 
therefore called " sacred : " 

"'High at the head a branchy olive grows, 
And crowns the perched cliffs with shady boughs. 

Now, seated in the olive's sacred shade, 
Confer the hero and the martial maid." 

The oleaster (wild olive), with the branches of which the victors 
were crowned at Olympia, was said to have been brought to Elis 
from the extreme west by Hercules, a legend adopted by Pindar. 
In the market-place of Megara stood a very ancient wild olive, 
dating from the heroic ages. Thus the existence of the wild 
olive in Greece is vouched for by the oldest authorities and tra- 
ditions; but it is very improbable that, in a climate somewhat 
rude, and amongst a nation still young and undeveloped (com- 
pared to the Semites), it was ever cultivated into an oil-bearing 
tree ; far more likely its cultivation was introduced to the Greeks, 
with other valuable things, by neighbouring nations. The question 
is, how early ? Oil is not unknown to the Homeric world, but 
evidently only as a foreign production, to be used by the rich and 
noble. When the heroes have washed or bathed, their bodies are 
anointed with oil in the Oriental fashion, and rendered sleek and 
supple. When Nausicaa goes to the sea-shore, she receives from 
her mother a flask of scented oil. The corpse of Patroclus is 
washed and anointed with oil ; so are the manes of Achilles' 
horses, for they were sons of Zephyros, and immortal. In the 
treasure-house of Telemachus lay gold, bronze, wine, and scented 
oil. The salve used by the goddesses is especially costly and 
of rare virtue. Hera, when tempting Zeus, anoints herself with 
divine oil, which fills heaven and earth with its perfume. In 
Cyprus, the Graces anoint Aphrodite with immortal oil such as 
appertains to the gods. Penelope, in her grief, neither bathes 
nor anoints herself; but she sinks into a slumber, during which 
Athena purifies her face with the balm of immortal beauty used 



90 THE OLIVE-TREE. 



by Cytherea when she joins in the dance of the Graces. The 
explanation of two other passages in Homer was a puzzle even to 
tne ancients : in one, the garments of dancing youths are described 
as softly shining with oil ; in the other, oil drips from the clothes 
of maids as they sit. Either the author merely compares the 
liquid lustre of the stuff to that of oil ; or, according to a modern 
interpretation, the threads had been soaked in oil to make the 
fabric flexible or glossy, so that it still dripped with oil when the 
maids had it on ! — a hypothesis that hardly needs refuting. As 
scented garments were common in the East and among the epic 
gods, at least of the later epics, one might suppose that the author 
meant some volatile oil with which the dress was slightly sprinkled; 
but there is no mention of scent, only of shining^ and the analogy 
of the Greek word here employed points to the first opinion, already 
given by the ancient commentators. The white stone bench on 
which Nestor sits before the door of his house is also described 
as shining with fat, that is, glossy as if it were covered with fat. 
The jars used at the funeral of Patroclus doubtless contained 
honey and animal fat, two substances highly prized by primitive 
man, and therefore bestowed on the dead. When the river 
Titaresius is described in the Catalogue of Ships as rolling " his 
easy tides " into the Peneus, and yet not mixing with the latter 
stream, the author had no doubt observed the fact while bathing 
and anointing himself, that oil floats on the top of water. Taking 
all the passages together, they would seem to prove that oil was 
not a common native product, but a cosmetic introduced from 
the East, which gradually supplanted animal fats. It was used 
for anointing the body, but not for food or light. It is always 
very long before a northern people will reconcile itself to dressing 
its food with oil. As a German peasant relishes large pieces of 
fat bacon, but is rarely to be persuaded to pour oil over his vege- 
tables or fry his meat in it, so the Gauls, as Posidonius tells us, 
refused to use oil in the kitchen. It must have been the same with 
the ancient Greeks. So much the less can we expect that the tree 
itself had been already really cultivated. Among the rural scenes 
depicted on the shield of Achilles, we find a black field with 
ploughmen on it, a harvest scene, a vineyard and a vintage, herds 



THE OLIVE-TREE, 



91 



of sheep and cattle, but no olive grove. We saw before that the 
olive-tree and its fruit are mentioned in the same passages of the 
Odyssey that speak of the fig-tree, but that these passages are 
late additions, and probably were not composed before the begin- 
ning of the Olympiads. This is not to be doubted of the end 
of the Odyssey, and as to the other two passages, which, taken 
together, are really only one, they show clear traces of later 
insertion. Even in them the Olive-tree is only described as a 
garden-tree like the apple, pear, pomegranate, and fig, planted for 
the sake of its eatable fruit, and not as the object of cultivation 
for the production of oil. In one of the most original and 
glorious parts of the Odyssey, however, there is a verse, which, if 
the usual interpretation were correct, would oblige us to believe 
in the existence of cultivated olive-trees. Ulysses, thrown on the 
shores of Scheria, finds in the forest two trees growing together, 
and serving as a protection against sun and wind : 

" There grew two olives, closest of the grove, 
With roots entwined, and branches interwove ; 
Alike their leaves, but not alike they smiled 
With sister-fruits ; one fertile, one was wild." 

The Greek words are: "The one a p/iylia, the other an elaia" 
Now if phylia meant the oleaster, the other can only be the fruit- 
bearing olive-tree. But phylia is one of those words by which 
the ancients themselves no longer knew what the poet meant. 
Ammonius says the mastich, others a degenerate olive with 
myrtle-like leaves ; and Eustatius declares that many people used 
it in that sense down to his day. Pausanias mentions it as one 
of the species of unfruitful olive-trees. This later use of the name 
may very likely have originated in the very passage of Homer we 
have quoted. The word phylia by its derivation clearly gives 
a general and abstract meaning, that of a plant, particularly an 
evergreen plant, which is especially rich in vitality. If we must 
guess at some particular plant, the myrtle, which is not otherwise 
mentioned by Homer, would be the most probable in connection 
with a passage in Theophrastus, who says that some trees seem 
to love each other, and relates (quoting an older authority, 



92 THE OLIVE-TREE. 



Androtion) that the myrtle and olive-tree used to intertwine their 
roots, and the myrtle branches to grow through the boughs of the 
olive, while other plants shunned the neighbourhood of the olive- 
tree. It is possible that this belief also was derived from Homer ; 
but whatever plant may be supposed (for instance, the stone-lime, 
or some kind of elceagnus), the second tree mentioned in the 
passage, the elaia, is here, as elsewhere, the wild bushy oleaster, 
a plant of the woods, growing near the water far from the town, 
as the poet expressly says. It is not so easy to decide about 
another passage, in which the olive-tree is mentioned. Here it is 
related that Menelaus pierced Euphorbus, the son of Panthous, 
with his spear, and the wounded man fell to the ground like the 
sprout of a verdant olive-tree which a planter cultivates in a 
solitary, well-watered place ; soft airs breathe on it from all sides ; 
it bursts into white blossom ; but suddenly a whirlwind dashes it 
to the ground. Here it is certainly possible to suppose that it 
was a slip of oleaster, intended some day to yield, not fruit indeed, 
but shade, timber, and green leaves ; still the planting of a forest- 
tree is not very likely in the Homeric age so rich in woods. So, 
taking all together, we may say that, during the probably long 
period of which Homer's poems are the monument, we see the 
cultivation of the fig and olive at first unknown and foreign, then 
distantly announcing itself, and lastly, in later additions and a 
simile, coming forward bodily, and, as we might have expected, 
on the Ionian coasts and islands first of all. It was there also 
that the cultivation of oil flourished in the post-Homeric period. 
^Eschylus calls the island of Samos "olive-planted," and an 
anecdote that Aristotle of Thales relates bears still older witness 
as to Miletus and Chios. Thales, it seems, on meteorological 
grounds surmised that an unusually rich olive-crop was to be 
expected ; he therefore hired for the coming year all the olive- 
presses in Miletus and Chios, and as the harvest really turned out 
very abundant, he made a large profit by letting the presses ; 
thus proving that even a philosopher can derive a practical 
benefit from his science. In the Isle of Delos, which is sur- 
rounded by the Ionian Cyclades, and where from early times 
Ionian pilgrims assembled to hold their yearly processions — 



THE OLIVE-TREE. 



Latona, in giving birth to her divine Twins, had either clasped in 
her arms the Delian palm-tree, or held by an olive-tree, or leaned 
against both. The chorus in Euripides' " Iphigenia in Tauris " 
longs for the palm, the laurel, and the sacred olive of Delos. 
Strabo makes the goddess merely rest under an olive-tree after 
the birth of her children, by which turn of speech the conflicting 
forms of the myth were happily reconciled. The Ephesians 
afterwards declared that the birth at the foot of the olive-tree had 
not happened at Delos, but at Ephesus, and that the tree still 
existed, there being also a spring at Ephesus called " Under the 
Olives," which was mixed up with the legend of the foundation 
of that city. As the olive-tree is otherwise altogether foreign to 
the worship of Apollo (for the one dedicated to that god at Miletus 
is quite an exception), we may suppose that the olive in Delos, 
and the myth connected with it, were not native to that island, 
but owed their existence to the Athenians, and the rising worship 
of Pallas Athena; but in Rhodes, once an entirely Phoenician 
island, which afterwards belonged to the Dorians, the olive-tree 
must have existed in very ancient times. There the town of 
Lindos possessed a temple of Athena built by the Danaids, and 
containing offerings left by Cadmus, with an olive-grove that 
outrivalled the olive-trees of Attica. On the mainland of Greece, 
in the parts described by Hesiod, and therefore within the sphere 
of ^Eolian-Bceotian customs, there are still no traces of the cul- 
tivation of the olive. Among the later Greeks, Athens was 
considered the original seat of such culture ; and there is a 
remarkable saying in Herodotus, that "at a time not long past 
there was not an olive-tree in the world except those at Athens." 
Accordingly, when the Epidaurians, on the failure of their crop, 
applied to the oracle at Delphi, they were advised to make 
statues of Damia and Auxesia from the wood of the tame olive ; 
they therefore asked permission of the Athenians to cut down 
one of their olive-trees as being the most sacred, or because none 
existed elsewhere. The Athenians consented on condition that 
the Epidaurians should sacrifice every year to Athena Polias and 
to Erechtheus. At that time the ^Eginetes were still subject to 
Epidaurus ; but after that they fell away from their mother city, 



94 THE OLIVE-TREE. 



carried off the two images, and having neglected the promised 
sacrifices, incurred the enmity of Athens. Herodotus says nothing 
about the date of this event, but it probably took place about the 
middle of the sixth century b.c Already at the commencement 
of that century Solon promulgated laws concerning the cultivation 
of the fig and olive, which must therefore have had some impor- 
tance ; although Pisistratus, Athena's protege, is said to have first 
encouraged the planting of the useful olive in the hitherto bare 
and treeless country. In the Athenian Academy stood the sacred 
olive-trees (morice) dedicated to the goddess, which, unlike other 
sacred possessions, must have yielded a rich profit, for the 
numerous oil-vases given as prizes at the games instituted by 
Pisistratus were filled with oil from those trees. The trees in 
the Academy were from the stock of the mother olive in the 
citadel, which Athena herself had created and which, after being 
burnt by the Persians, sprouted up again spontaneously. From the 
Greek epithet applied to it, it must have been a mere groundling 
sucker. The fact that the Athenians distinguished by different 
names the wild from the cultivated olive proves that the cultiva- 
tion of the felix oliva had taken firm hold in Attica. Pindar 
mentions it in one of his hymns, and Herodotus makes the oracle 
speak of the tame olive. The whitish limestone soil of the Attic 
peninsula, unfriendly to corn, was just the reverse for olives ; and 
there, to quote the words of the chorus in " GEdipus at Colonus," 
the trees flourished " more than in the land of Asia or the great 
Dorian Isle of Pelops." But how came Pallas Athena to be 
patroness of the new culture, and why were oil and the cultivation 
of the olive so intimately and variously mixed up with the worship 
of the Goddess of Light who sprang from the head of Jupiter ? 
Suidas says, because oil served for lighting, and the olive-tree fed 
the flame of the lamp; from which we perceive that the use of oil 
for burning came second in order of time, as its use for food came 
third. Homer is not yet aware of any connexion between the 
olive and the goddess, for the adjective sacred used once in the 
Odyssey cannot be taken as indicating such a connexion. But 
when oil formed the principal source of riches and the character- 
istic product of the Attic land, when the Athenians boasted that. 



THE OLIVE-TREE. 



95 



not long before, the cultivated olive was to be found only in their 
country, when they claimed all places where corn and olives grew 
as their property, they could not do otherwise than dedicate the 
pride and blessing of their country to that country's goddess, and 
look upon it as her gift. 

It may be the fact that wild olives grew on the rock of the 
citadel, that one of them was grafted with a fruit-bearing olive 
from over the sea, and supplied other slips and cuttings, and that 
the root of the vivax oliva put forth fresh shoots after the burning 
of the city by the Persians ; but the myth had no need of such 
realistic support. When at the end of the Persian war the old 
national hero, Theseus, and his deeds and adventures, reappearea 
in a transfigured light, he also was said to have broken oft" a 
branch of the sacred olive-tree before sailing for Crete, to have 
wrapped it in white wool, and uttering a prayer, to have laid it 
before Apollo's statue in the Delphinium. In Sicyon too, which, 
like Attica, had a soil favourable to the olive, and produced in 
abundance the " Sicyonian berry," the old fabulous king, Epopeus, 
had built a temple to Athena, and the goddess had shown her 
favour by causing a spring of oil to flow in front of the temple — 
thus directly bestowing on Epopeus the oil which the Athenians 
and their descendants only procured by dint of planting, plucking, 
and pressing the berries. In the first century of the Olympiads, 
when the coast-lands of the west — Italy, Sicily, Gaul — became the 
beat of innumerable and flourishing Greek colonies, a new and 
more extensive field was opened for the cultivation of the olive-tree, 
in which it flourished almost as well as under its native skies. 

In the course of the seventh, and certainly the sixth century 
B.C., the beautiful hill and coast districts of the islands and of 
South Italy were gradually covered with evergreen and fruit- 
bearing groves of olives. Possibly, however, it was not Greek but 
Phoenician hands that sowed the first olive seed or planted -the 
-first cutting in the soil of the distant west. A myth related of Aris- 
tseus seems to contain a faint remembrance of such an occurrence. 
Aristaeus, an ancient Arcadian, Thessalian, and Boeotian pastoral 
divinity, whom the first colonists had brought into Sicily, was 
believed by their descendants to be the inventor of the olive and 



96 THE OLIVE-TREE. 



of oil. In this myth it is worthy of note, that Aristaeus is not said, 
like Athena, to have created the olive-tree, but to have invented 
oil or the olive ; that he taught the preparation of oil, to which 
belongs the use of the press ; and that for this reason he was 
worshipped by the Sicilians during the olive harvest. But the 
same Aristaeus, before ever he came to Sicily, had been ruler of 
Sardinia, which island was foreign to the Greeks ; had there intro- 
duced agriculture and tree-culture — the island having till then 
been inhabited only by very many large birds — and had begotten 
two sons. From Sardinia he went to Sicily, civilized that island 
also, and among other rural arts invented the process of gaining 
oil from olives. Now, as Aristaeus could not hold his ground 
against the new overpowering and dazzling worship of Apollo and 
Dionysus (though essentially kindred deities), but sank into the 
position of their son or tutor, he was evidently one with a Libyo- 
Phoenician god whom the Greek colonists had found in Sicily when 
they came there, and had adopted as their own. This god, a son 
of the nymph Cyrene, and the first planter of the silphion in 
Cyrenaea, could only have come to Sardinia from Africa; from 
Sardinia he goes to Sicily, and his plant or invention must have 
followed the same path. The myth says nothing about the time 
of this occurrence, and it must remain doubtful whether or not 
the Greeks found olive-groves in the vicinity of the Phoenician 
commercial settlements of which they took forcible possession. 
Afterwards, when oil had become an important article of com- 
merce in the Grecian fatherland also, the two streams of civilization 
met in Sicily : the Carthaginian, and that modelled on the type of 
Attica, etc. 

Turning to the mainland of Italy, we meet, at the first step, 
with a kind of chronological notice ; a piece of good fortune that 
is very rare in the ancient history of culture. Pliny, quoting the 
annalist L. Fenestella, says that at the time of Tarquinius Priscus, 
in 616 B.C., not an olive-tree existed in all Italy. If this report 
be not a mere echo of the passage in Herodotus — and the addition 
of "nor in Spain and Africa," leads to such a suspicion — we may 
make a positive use of it to claim for the age of the Tarquins, an 
age of lively intercourse with the Greeks of Campania, the fame 



THE OLIVE-TREE. 



97 



of having brought the olive, together with other Greek arts, to 
Latium. Perhaps the report originated from a Cumanian docu- 
ment. At any rate, the Latin words oliva and oleum^ which are 
derived from the Greek, prove that the tree was introduced by 
Greeks and no others ; and many of the words relating to the 
kinds of olive and the preparation of the oil are also Greek terms 
very little altered in the Latin tongue. When the apex of the 
Flamen Dialis's hat consists of an olive branch bound up and 
fastened with wool, it results that this very old custom was never- 
theless younger than the date of the arrival of the Greeks in Italy 
and their intercourse with the Latins. For what is the wool- 
bound olive branch but the elpeaaovr] borrowed from the Greeks ? 
A reminiscence of this may be contained in the statement that 
Ascanius first instituted the Virga lanata at Alba ; it was therefore 
neither Etruscan nor Sabine. Virgil indeed makes King Numa 
and the priest of Mars appear adorned with olive branches, but 
his poetic fancy has here evidently bestowed on heroes of the 
primitive age the later Grecian customs. In the triumphal pro- 
cessions of victorious generals, even the servants who had not 
been in the battle wore wreaths of olive, a Greek sign rather of 
peaceful than of warlike enterprise. At the ovations, which were 
an inferior kind of triumph, the crown of honour consisted of 
olive leaves. At the feast celebrated July 15th in honour of 
Castor and Pollux, crowns of olive were worn as ornaments ; and 
the adoration paid to the said heroes originated in Magna Grsecia. 
These facts are all signs of an acquaintance with the olive in the 
early days of the republic, but not a proof of its real cultivation. 
The latter must have spread from the various Greek centres to 
wherever the soil was favourable, first on the coasts and then in 
the interior, in proportion as the natural prejudice against the use 
of oil was overcome. Amphis, a comic poet who lived in the 
latter half of the fourth century, about the time of Philip and 
Alexander of Macedon, speaks in praise of the oil of Thurii, which 
stood on the site of ancient Sybaris. Thence and from Tarentum 
probably came the Calabrian and Sallentine olives mentioned by 
Cato ; and the celebrated Licinian olive of Campania, and that 
from Mount Taburnus on the borders of Campania and Samnium, 

7 



98 THE OLIVE-TREE. 



will have been first introduced by the Campanian Greeks. The 
Sabine mountains were covered with olives, but the kind called 
Sergia, though a large tree, which endured the cold well and was 
rich in oil, lacked fineness — it had therefore undergone the 
changes observed in vines when transplanted to colder regions in 
the north. At the other side of the Apennines, where the splendid 
corn-fields commence, the climate, then as now, was unfavourable 
to the cultivation of the olive, but the tree still flourished in ancient 
Picenum, now the province of Ancona, which may be reckoned 
as belonging to South Italy. In the first century b.c. Italy was 
so rich in oil that it outrivalled all other countries in the quality 
and cheapness of the product. 

Favoured by the soil and climate of Provence, the olive, like 
the vine, gradually spread from Massilia to the interior of Gaul, 
though not like the vine as far as the Marne and Moselle. The 
olive plantations on the Ligurian coast, which is still one immense 
luxuriant olive-grove, were no doubt of Massiliote origin. Where 
the mountains begin to rise at a short distance from the sea, the 
olive-tree was no longer found, so that the wreaths and branches 
worn or carried by the inhabitants when they went to meet Han- 
nibal, cannot have been of olive, although the word used by 
Polybius has generally that meaning. In Strabo's time Genoa 
furnished these mountain-folk with oil, and received in exchange 
cattle, skins, and honey. On the other side of Italy, near the 
mouth of the Po, the low, marshy ground forbade the introduction 
of the olive, though the trade of this district with the Ionian 
islands, with Tarentum and afterwards Syracuse was both ancient 
and brisk. On the other hand, the opposite coast — that of Istria 
and Liburnia, with their sunny hills slanting towards the sea, and 
protected at the back by high mountains — was extremely favourable 
to the cultivation of the olive ; and, indeed, the oil from the west 
coast of the peninsula of Istria was prized next to Italian oil, and 
rivalled that of Spanish Bsetica. The oil exported from Aquileia 
to the Illyrians on the Danube in exchange for cattle, skins, and 
slaves, must have been that received from Istria; and it is an 
interesting fact that the Pannonians and Celts of the former 
region, in Strabo's time, were eager not only for wine, welcome to 



THE OLIVE-TREE. 99 



all barbarians, but also for oil, though it may be only for burning 
in lamps. Even in the time of the Goths, after so many alarms 
and disturbances, that region had a superabundance of oil. 
Apicius, a celebrated gourmand of the time of Tiberius, and 
other authors, give instructions for artificially producing Liburnian 
oil, which must therefore have been still celebrated. Strabo says 
that the above-mentioned province of Bsetica exported not only 
much, but the finest oil ; and Bsetican Corduba excelled or 
equalled the celebrated olive groves of Venafrum and Istria. It 
was natural that Spain, being a southern land, and possessing great 
variety of position and soil, should have adopted the new culture 
in proportion as foreign civilization took root, first on the coasts, 
then in the interior. 

When the Roman Empire had reached its utmost extent, the 
cultivated olive had also spread from its starting-point at the 
south-eastern corner of the Mediterranean to all the countries in 
which it is now found, and throve in many parts of the south of 
Europe as if native there (note 34). According to popular belief 
(entertained also by the ancients) the European olive bears fruit 
only once in two years ; but this is only true in so far that 
the tree, when exhausted by an extraordinary yield of fruit, 
cannot produce the same quantity the following year, unless 
assisted by the most favourable weather or extra culture. It is 
also not quite true that the olive, as Theophrastus believed, is 
never found farther from the sea than seven and a half geo- 
graphical miles. This is only true in the sense that the tree loves 
the breath of the Mediterranean; but the expanse of the Lake 
of Garda, for example, is also sufficient for its well-being. Its 
proper sphere of propagation, however, coincides almost exactly 
with that of the oval formed by the coast-lands and bays of the 
Mediterranean. Beautiful, in a romantic sense, Minerva's tree 
cannot be said to be, but nothing so readily excites a sense of 
peaceful order and cultivation than the rows of trees in an olive 
plantation, with their whispering leaves and twisted trunks softly 
shading the slopes of the hills or the gently undulating plains; and, 
like Columella, we are fain to bestow upon the olive the epithet 
^prima omnium arborum, "chief of all trees." It is not every- 



THE OLIVE-TREE. 



where that the oil produced can equal that of Provence, Genoa, 
or Lucca. The oils from Calabria, Sicily, and Sardinia, are 
generally impure, and fit only to make soap, or be used in the 
manufacture of cloth. The reason lies in the faulty method of 
preparation, which, in its turn, is explained by the agrarian and 
economic conditions prevalent there. Particular care is needed 
in gathering the harvest ; the fruit, as soon as ripe, should be 
plucked by hand, berry by berry, and put into the oil-press without 
loss of time ; rapidity and cleanliness are all-important. But in 
most places there is a great want of capital, utensils, and hands. 
The naturally tender fruit is knocked off the trees with sticks, or, 
what is worse, is allowed to fall at its own time, over-ripe and 
half-rotten (the ancients already complained of both these prac- 
tices). Then the fruit remains lying on the ground, and begins 
to ferment before an oil-press is at liberty. The latter is also 
generally so ill-constructed that it causes a waste of labour, and a 
considerable part of the oil is left in the press. Now as the 
common man prefers this evil-smelling produce to the best 
Provence table-oil on account of its stronger taste, he is naturally 
not inclined to take any extra trouble to produce better oil. But 
with all this, there is no denying the progress lately made. When 
once the condition of the farmers is improved by a healthier cir- 
culation of blood in the body politic, the cultivation of oil will be 
a source of riches to all the mountainous southern regions of the 
new kingdom. "There are two liquids," says Pliny, "that are 
agreeable to the human body : inwardly wine, outwardly oil ; both 
coming from trees, but oil the more necessary." 

Democritus of Abdera, the celebrated philosopher, who attained 
an age of more than a hundred years, when asked how a man 
could preserve his health and prolong his days, answered, " Use 
inwardly honey, outwardly oil." A similar reply was given by 
Pollio Romilius, who also lived a hundred years, when the 
Emperor Augustus asked him by what means he had remained 
so robust : " By wine and honey inside, and oil outside." Now- 
adays oil is no longer used as an external cosmetic, or only in the 
form of soap ; but it is just the latter article, a northern invention 
unknown to the ancients, that has entirely superseded the Oriental- 



THE OLIVE-TREE. 101 

Greek custom of anointing the body, which in Italy, indeed, was 
only usual among the upper classes. The anointing of Kings and 
Kaisers, and extreme unction, still remain as faint echoes of the 
old Roman time. 



DOMIC I LI A TION. TREE-CUL TV RE. 

Wherever the cultivation of the three before-mentioned plants — 
the vine, the fig, and the olive — was prosecuted on a large scale, 
there the face of the country and the habits and manners of the 
people were of necessity changed. Tree-culture was one step 
more on the path to settled habitations ; with and by it men first 
became permanently domiciled. The transition from a nomadic 
to a settled life has nowhere been sudden ; it was always accom- 
plished in many intermediate stages, at each one of which the 
nations often remained stationary for centuries. The wandering 
shepherd hastily sows a piece of ground, from which he as hastily 
gathers the ensuing harvest ; next spring he chooses another and 
fresh piece, which is no sooner stripped of its spoils than he 
neglects it in turn. When a tribe has settled on some especially 
fertile spot, building fragile huts, there too the soil is exhausted 
in a few years ; the tribe breaks up its quarters, loads its animals 
and waggons with its movable goods, and goes on to new ground. 
Even when such a settlement has become more permanent, the 
idea of individual right to the ground is not yet realized. The 
cultivated land, of which there is an abundance in comparison to 
the scanty population, is common property like the pastures, and 
is divided anew among the people every year. Such was the con- 
dition of the Germans in the time of Tacitus, and this is the plain 
meaning of that historian's words, which have been carefully ex- 
plained in a contrary and more welcome sense by patriotic com- 
mentators. The communistic, half-nomadic form of civilization, 
which was closely connected with ancient patriarchal life, still 
prevails in many parts of Russia, among the Tartars, Bedouins, 
and other races. During this first stage of agriculture, cattle- 



D OMICIL I A TION. TREE- CUL TURK. 



breeding is still the principal occupation, milk and flesh are the 
staple food, roving and plunder the ruling passion. The huts or 
houses are lightly built of wood, and easily take fire ; the plough 
is nothing but a pointed branch guided by slaves taken in war, 
and only slightly scratches the ground ; the foresight of the com- 
munity is very short, extending only from spring to autumn. The 
sowing of seed in winter is a considerable advance, but the 
decisive step is taken when the Culture of Trees commences. 
Then only arises the feeling of a settled home and the idea of 
property. For a tree requires nursing and watering for many 
years before it will bear fruit, after which it yields a harvest every 
year, while the covenant with the annual " grass " which Demeter 
taught men to sow is at an end the moment the grain is gathered. 
A hedge, the sign of complete possession, is raised to protect the 
vineyard or the orchard ; for the mere husbandman a boundary 
stone had been sufficient. The sown field must wait for dew and 
rain, but the tree-planter teaches the mountain rivulet to wind 
round his orchards, and in so doing gets involved in questions of 
law and property with his neighbours — questions that can only be 
solved by a fixed political organization. One of the oldest 
political documents with which we are acquainted, the treaty 
sworn to by the Delphic Amphictyons, contains a decree that 
" running water shall not be cut off from any of the allied cities 
either in peace or in war." 

A house surrounded by fruit trees is intended, like them, to 
last for many years ; it is therefore built of stone, and internally 
decorated with hereditary property, and the acquisitions of pro- 
gressive civilization. Iron is found, and gradually becomes a 
more and more frequent, and at last the principal, material for all 
implements. The gods themselves become nobler : the shepherd, 
who is accustomed to slaughter animals, and whose poetry revels 
in pictures of frightful gashes given with the stone-axe, will 
offer to his deities raw and bleeding victims ; the husbandman 
sacrifices to Ceres and Terminus with gentler offerings of bruised 
spelt and salt, garlands and cakes ; but wine first attuned the 
hardy peasant to mildness and mirth, and made him delight in 
dramatic games; while it was the olive, the tree of Minerva, 



104 D MIC I LI A TION. TREE-CUL TV RE. 

goddess of intellectual light, that first furnished a symbol for 
peace and prayer and kindness. 

The ancient epic poets already distinguish carefully between 
the three methods of utilizing the ground — cattle-breeding, or 
flesh, milk, and wool ; agriculture, or the sweet fruit of the halm, 
the nourisher of mankind ; and lastly, tree-planting, or wine and 
oil. For the last two stages (of which the third becomes the more 
limited to the vine the older the passage is), the technical expres- 
sions, aroo, I ear or till, aroura, ear-th, or til-th, are contrasted 
with phyteus, I plant, phytalia, plantation. Diomed says that his 
father dwelt in a rich house, and possessed many fertile fields, 
orchards, and herds : 

" There, rich in fortune's gifts, his acres till'd, 
Beheld his vines their liquid harvest yield, 
And numerous flocks that whitened all the field." — Iliad. 

Sarpedon says to Glaucus : 

"Why boast we, Glaucus, our extended reign, 
Where Xanthus' streams enrich the Lycian plain, 
Our numerous herds that range the fruitful field, 
And hills where vines their purple harvest yield ? " 

Achilles asks ^Eneas : 

" Has Troy proposed some spacious tract of land 
An ample forest, or a fair domain 
Of hill for vines and arable for grain ? " 

— namely, as the prize for killing him. The ^Etolians offer 
Meleager, if he will take part in the fight : 

" Full fifty acres of the richest ground, 

Half pasture green, and half with vineyards crowned." 

In another Homeric passage, there is added to the description 
of corn-fields, gardens, and pastures, in a remarkable manner, 
the fishing on the sea : 

" In wavy gold thy summer vales are dressed, 
Thy autumns bend with copious fruit oppressed ; 
With flocks and herds each grassy plain is stored, 
And fish of every kind thy seas afford." — Odyssey. 

Later prose writers also mention the corn-field and plantation 



DOMICILIATION. TREE-CULTURE. 105 

together as the two integral parts of agriculture. In Xenophon's 
"CEconomicus," Socrates converses with Ischomachus about agri- 
culture, and asks whether plantations may be considered a part of 
it. " Certainly," replies Ischomachus ; and the dialogue goes on 
to discuss the depth and width of ditches, irrigation, choice of 
ground, etc., with exclusive reference to the vine, olive, and fig- 
tree. As Demeter (Ceres) is the goddess of the fruits of the 
field, so the half-Oriental Dionysus (Bacchus) is especially the 
personification of the fruit of trees, and the blessings derived 
from it ; though an inscription at Selinus seems to make Demeter 
also a guardian of the orchard. 

It was the same in Italy. There also corn-field and plantation 
were co-ordinated branches of culture. Dionysius of Halicar- 
nassus praises Italy as excluding no kind of culture ; here it is 
treeless, because it produces corn ; there poor in grain, because 
planted with trees, etc. Appian tells us that when the Romans 
were conquering Italy, they offered the waste land to all who 
would cultivate it, u requiring only as yearly rent a tenth of the 
produce of sown land, and a fifth of that of planted land." The 
combination of purely arable cultivation with the planting of 
vines and fruit-trees appeared so natural to Cn. Tremellius Scrofa, 
an inhabitant of South Italy, and contemporary of Varro, that he 
remarks the absence of the last kind of culture in Transalpine 
Gaul and the Rhine districts, as well as the custom of manuring 
with marl, and the use of ashes instead of salt. 

It is interesting that the sacred books of the Zends also men- 
tion the same threefold utilization of the ground. In the " Ven- 
didad " the question is asked : " What is the third thing that is 
most agreeable to this earth ? " And Ahura-mazda replies : " The 
place, O holy Zarathustra, where cultivation produces most corn, 
hay, and fruit-bearing trees." " Fourthly, Who is the fourth that 
fills this earth with the greatest contentment ? " Ahura-mazda 
answers : "He who cultivates most corn, grass, and trees that 
afford nourishment, O holy Zarathustra." 

Herodotus relates that Mardonius the Persian, when persua- 
ding Xerxes to march against the Athenians, praised Europe as a 
beautiful country where the soil was very fertile, and all kinds of 



106 DOMICILIATION. TREE-CULTURE. 

fruit-trees grew. On the other hand, Herodotus describes Baby- 
lonia as rich in corn, but utterly devoid of fruit-trees. 

In the Old Testament and in the Greek epics we find orchards 
described as being surrounded with ditches, hedges, or walls, 
while the sown field was open. Like the vineyard in the parable, 
Isaiah v. : " My well-beloved hath a vineyard in a very fruit- 
ful hill ; and he fenced it, and gathered the stones thereof, and 
planted it with the choicest vine ; " so the vineyard figured on 
the shield of Achilles was also surrounded with a hedge and 
ditch. Oineus, the ruler of Kalydon, killed his own son Toxeus 
(archer) because he had dared to leap the ditch that surrounded the 
vines. The material used for fencing is rather dubiously described 
by an etymologically obscure name, ai/xaaia — either thorns or 
stones, or even both together, according to the character of the 
district. At least we read in the Odyssey that the god-like 
swineherd fenced his court with stones, and planted thorns upon 

them : 

" The wall was stone from neighbouring quarries borne, 
Encircled with a fence of native thorn ; " 

for "encircled" read "surmounted." Such enclosed orchards 
and vineyards are still to be found all over South Italy, the lanes 
winding between walls and hedges of prickly bushes that hide the 
view from the dusty traveller. And in that part of the world, 
even now, a piece of ground that is walled or hedged in is 
universally considered more valuable than an t open one. 

In Homer's time, it is weak persons, especially old men, that 
are entrusted with the care of trees, and who, bent to the earth, 
plant, dig, and prune. Fighting, ploughing, and mowing was the 
work of lusty youths and men. This is clearly seen in a passage 
in the Odyssey ; Eurymachus, one of the suitors, laughs at 
Ulysses' bald head, and proposes to hire him : 

" To tend the rural trade, 
To dress the walk, and form the embowering shade." 

To which Ulysses angrily replies : 

"Should we, O prince, engage 
In rival tasks beneath the burning rage 



DOMICILIATION. TREE-CULTURE. 107 

Of summer suns ; were both constrained to wield 

Foodless the scythe along the burdened field ; 

Or should we labour while the ploughshare wounds, 

With steers of equal strength, th' allotted grounds : 

Beneath my labours how thy wondering eyes 

Might see the sable field at once arise ! 

Should Jove dire war unloose, with spear and shield 

And nodding helm, I tread the ensanguined field, 

Fierce in the van : then wouldst thou, wouldst thou — say — 

Misname me glutton on that glorious day ? " 

So too Laertes, full of years, has retired to the gardens, where his 
companion is the aged slave Dolios, whom Penelope had brought 
from her father's house to that of her husband. The implement 
used was either the one-bladed spade mentioned in the Iliad, 
or the two-pronged rake named in contrast with the plough in a 
fragment of ^Eschylus, with other tools of the same kind. 

When men began to cultivate trees, wars became more disas- 
trous, there being more objects to destroy. According to the 
earliest custom — not wanting notice in Homer, and still existing 
among the Bedouins — it was a common privilege of war and 
punishment of the enemy to drive away the herds or steal the 
horses. Frequently the owners pursued the retreating robbers, 
and recovered their property ; at the worst, the lost cattle were 
soon replaced by new. The Germans retreated into their forests 
and swamps, and the Romans were unable to harass them. 
" Why should we risk a pitched battle with you ? " said Idan- 
thyrsus, king of the Scythians, to Darius ; " we have no cities to 
be taken and no plantations to be rooted up." In our own era, 
in 181 2, the Russians acted in a similar manner ; they even burnt 
their own capital which consisted mostly of wooden houses, re- 
treated farther and farther into the inhospitable interior, leaving 
their defence to distance, climate, and the wilderness. It is very 
different where men dwell in substantial houses surrounded by 
vines, olives, and fig-trees ; there a cruel foe can cause a desola- 
tion that will endure for a generation to come. The water-courses 
are destroyed, and thereby the chief spring of life cut off ; it costs 
more time and money to restore them than can be obtained aftei 
a disastrous war. The olive-trees are cut down, and grow again 



108 DOMICILIATION. TREE-CULTURE. 

but slowly ; the vine requires many years before it can bear fruit. 
The Mosaic law indeed forbade the destruction of fruit-trees; 
Deuteronomy xx. 19 : " When thou shalt besiege a city a long time, 
in making war against it to take it, thou shalt not destroy the trees 
thereof by forcing an axe against them ; for thou mayest eat of 
them, and thou shalt not cut them down : " but the Old Testament 
itself is a proof that this law was never observed in the fury of the 
fight. For example, the national hero of the Hebrews, Samson, 
not only burnt the corn in the enemy's country (which would grow 
again next year), but also the vines and olives, not so easy to re- 
place. When Alyattes, King of Lydia, was unable to take Miletus, 
he wasted the district every year, destroying trees and corn. In 
later times the East was repeatedly desolated by invading hordes 
and has never recovered its former prosperity. The history of the 
Greeks is full of similar barbarisms — both before and after Plato, 
who would not suffer them in his " Republic," at least between 
Greeks. How often, while reading Thucydides, do we not meet 
with the significant words, " They wasted Attica, both the districts 
where the vegetation had been before destroyed and had sprouted 
anew, and those which had been spared by former invasions " ! A 
passage in a speech by Lysias clearly proves how the Peloponne- 
sians treated the olive-groves of Attica : " Ye know that at that 
time many regions were covered with olive-trees, most of which 
are now destroyed; and the country has since then become 
barren." During the first Messenian war the trees were spared, 
but only because the Lacedaemonians regarded the country as their 
own ; afterwards they wasted it all the more. During their wars 
with the Eleans, as Herodotus relates, " When the army had 
marched into the enemy's country and had already begun to cut 
down the trees, an earthquake happened ; " and farther on, " he 
marched against the city, devastating and burning the land." In 
modern Greek wars of liberation, the common method of punish- 
ing the enemy was to cut down and uproot ; and the mediaeval 
chronicles of Southern Italy too frequently mention the same 
manner of treating an enemy's country. Barbarossa decreed that 
those who destroyed vineyards or orchards should be punished 
like incendiaries. On the other hand, a rebel and evil-doer not 



DOMICILIATION. TREE-CULTURE. 109 

only forfeited his life, but his house was pulled down, his fruit-trees 
felled, and his vines uprooted (note 35). 

The French in Algiers have had an opportunity of learning 
how different half agriculture is from full agriculture ; or agriculture 
joined to nomadic customs from agriculture which includes tree- 
culture. To get at the swift Arabs, the European columns 
were obliged to rival them in rapidity and cunning, for if a rumour 
of the approach of the enemy had reached a village only two 
hours before his arrival, nothing was to be found in the place 
where it was hoped that the Arabs might be overtaken but the still 
warm ashes of their camp-fires. The tribe had retreated farther 
into the interior, and when pursued went on retreating till they 
gained the inaccessible desert Their crops were mown down by 
the French, their herds, when found, were driven away, and then 
sometimes the tribe would humbly submit; but the same scene 
was probably repeated the following year. Very differently did 
the Kabyles of the Djurdjur mountains behave when invaded. 
These direct descendants of the ancient Libyans are a horticultural 
people, with houses partly made of stone, possessing strictly divided 
freeholds, marked off by hedges and walls over which hang boughs 
full of fruit, and with a strong sense of attachment to the place of 
their birth. They live among the mountains where it is difficult to 
reach them ; but when this is once accomplished, a small fortress 
with a scanty garrison is sufficient to hold them in check. They 
pay tribute regularly, and are content if left undisturbed to practise 
their own customs and communal government. A few roads are 
made through their mountains, the unaccustomed safety they enjoy 
encourages them to visit the markets and exchange their wares ; 
and imperceptibly, but surely, European civilization penetrates 
among the hitherto seclusive and suspicious race. The density 
of a population is also in exact proportion to its more or less 
complete conversion from a nomadic life. A Bedouin family 
requires for its support a large space, of which it only partially 
makes use ; the Kabyles cultivate the soil and elicit from it a ten- 
fold produce ; in the one case square miles are indispensable, in the 
other a garden a few feet square is quite sufficient. 



ASSES, MULES, GOATS. 

Contemporaneous with the adoption of the novel culture, be- 
cause closely connected with it, were the introduction of the Ass, 
the breeding of Mules, and the propagation of the Goat. 

The patient, hardworking, and intelligent Ass, which obediently 
fulfilled many domestic duties — driving the mill and the draw-well; 
carrying baskets full of earth to the hills ; and accompanying its 
master to market and feast, loaded with the produce of the soil — 
had no need of fat meadows, shady trees, and ample space like the 
ox; it was content with what came first, the way-side herb, the 
refuse of the table, with straw, twigs, thistles, and brambles. That 
the ass came to Greece from Semitic Asia Minor and Syria — though 
its original home may have been Africa, where its relations still 
live — is taught us by the history of language (note 36), and con- 
firmed by the oldest known conditions of nations and culture. In 
the epic time, when cattle-breeding and agriculture were the chief 
occupations, the ass had not yet become a common domestic 
animal ; it is only mentioned once in the Iliad, and that only in a 
simile invented and inserted by a poet who was prejudiced against 
the Salaminians and Athenians ; the simile is paradoxical and 
awkwardly paired with the one preceding. In the Odyssey, the 
second part of which afforded plenty of opportunity for noticing 
such an animal, the ass is never named at all; nor is it spoken of 
by Hesiod. As the Latin word asinus has an archaic form which 
seems to reach back to a period preceding the Greek colonization, 
the animal must have come into Italy overland through the Illyrian 
tribes ; or must we suppose that the people of Cumge, when they 
founded their first city on the present Isle of Ischia, still said 
asnos? Later on, in Italy the ass, besides being valued for the 



ASSES, MULES. m 



domestic duties he performed, was of great use in facilitating 
import and export in the mountainous parts of the peninsula. 
Oil and wine and even corn were carried on donkey-back from 
the interior to the sea ; Varro tells us that merchants kept herds 
of asses expressly for that purpose. The ass, and with it its name, 
accompanied the progress of the culture of the vine and olive to 
the north, not crossing the limits of that culture. In proportion 
as the ure-ox, the bison, and the elk died out, the long-eared 
foreign beast become domesticated in Gaul, receiving various 
names, and living in the customs, jokes, proverbs, and fables of 
the people. Germany, however, proved too cold for the animal. 

The Mule, already frequently mentioned by Homer, came from 
Pontic Asia Minor, or, as Homer expressly says, from the Henetians, 
a Paphlagonian people : 

"Where rich Henetia breeds her savage mules ; " — Iliad. 

on which the Scholiast remarks, " The crossing of the ass with the 
horse was first invented by the Henetians." In another passage 
it is the Mysians who bring mules to Priam : 

" Last to the yoke the well-matched mules they bring 
(The gift of Mysia to the Trojan king)." 

The Mysians and Paphlagonians were neighbours, and the way to 
the latter led through the country of the former. In a fragment 
by Anacreon the Mysians are directly named as the inventors of 
mule-breeding. The mention in the Old Testament of Togarmah 
— that is, Armenia or Cappadocia — as the place whence the best 
mules came agrees with the above (Ezekiel xxvii. 14) ; the law 
forbade the Israelites themselves to breed mules. Still later we 
hear of Cappadocian and Galatian mules, it being reported of the 
first that they had the power of reproduction ; they must there- 
fore have enjoyed especially favourable natural conditions. 

Very remarkable, because analogous to the religious ideas of 
the Israelites (perhaps also to those of other Semitic and half- 
Semitic races), is the old prohibition ascribed to the mythic 
period against breeding mules in the land of the Eleans. King 
CEnomaus, son of Neptune and father of Hippodameia, is said to 



112 ASSES, MULES, GOATS. 

have pronounced a curse against such breeding, and from that 
time the Eleans took their mares out of the country to be put to 
asses. Perhaps this Elean custom was only a pious survival 
from those early times, when the only mules in Greece were intro- 
duced from the East, and national feeling was against the 
unnatural mixture. In the Odyssey we are told that Naemon of 
Ithaca possessed twelve mares in fertile Elis with their mule foals : 

" For Elis I should sail with utmost speed, 
T'import twelve mares which there luxurious feed, 
And twelve young mules, a strong laborious race, 
New to the plough, unpractised in the trace." 

The mule, as represented in the epics, is already a hard-working 
animal, used for field-labour, harnessed to the waggon, or carrying 
loads, and it is frequently described as patient and laborious. 
A well-known verse of Theognis says that the mule was preferred 
to the ass as being the stronger animal. The abstract Greek 
appellations hemi-onos (half-ass), andoreus, oureus (mountain-animal, 
found in Hesiod and throughout antiquity in this double form), are 
striking. The last name is explained by the Iliad, where the 
mule is described as bearing heavy loads of wood from the moun- 
tains to the plains (Books xvii. and xxiii). 

The mulus, or mule, was brought to Italy, as the name proves, 
from Greece (note 37). The Latin name was afterwards used by 
all the nations which adopted the animal. In Varro's time, just 
as now, carts were drawn along the high-roads by mules, which 
were not only strong, but pleased the eye by their handsome 
appearance. The Greeks were equally delighted with the animal, 
and Nausicaa's car is drawn to the sea-shore and back by mules. 

The Goat was used as a domestic animal in the mountainous 
districts of the south, where cultivation more resembled that of 
gardens than of fields. It feeds on the spicy herbs that grow on 
sun-heated cliffs, is content with tough shrubs, and yields aromatic 
milk. Stony Attica, which was rich in figs and olives, also 
nourished innumerable goats; and one of the four old Attic 
phylae was named after the goat. Even if the animal came into 
Europe with the first Aryan immigrants, and accordingly the 



GOATS, BEES. 113 



Hellenes and Italians had not to make its acquaintance after 
reaching their new home, yet it was only there, and under the 
Semitic mode of cultivation there adopted, that it found its proper 
place and true use (note 38). 

It is obvious, too, that the keeping of Bees could only have been 
adopted after the rise of tree-culture. The man who planted his 
own olives, for the fruit of which he had to wait for years, could 
easily keep beehives within his enclosed ground, nursing the bees 
through the winter, increasing their number by colonies derived 
from the parent-stock, and in due season receiving the reward of 
his exertions in the shape of honey and wax. Aristaeus, the 
inventor of oil, also invented apiculture, and Autuchos, i.e., the 
self-possessing, is named as his brother. Homer knows nothing of 
bee hives; the simile of the Achseans gathering together "like 
bees flying out of a cleft in the rock," is derived from the swarm- 
ing of wild bees. We first meet with an artificial beehive in a 
not very old passage in Hesiod's Theogony; in it the working-bees 
are distinguished from the drones, which latter are compared to 
women! In those days the shepherd robbed the wild honey-combs 
which he found in the forest, and if the spoil was abundant he 
made mead of the honey ; the husbandman fermented his flour 
into a kind of raw beer; the vintner often mixed the honey from 
his hives with his wine, which he then called mulsum, and believed 
that the enjoyment of this beverage would lengthen his days 
(note 39), 



STONE ARCHITECTURE. 

It has already been hinted in the previous pages, that with the 
increased stability of life resulting from the invention of horticul- 
ture, the dwellings of men also acquired a more enduring character. 
In fact, it was from the south-eastern corner of the Mediterranean 
coast, that stone architecture first gradually spread, like wine and 
oil, to all the coasts and peninsulas of Southern Europe, and thence 
to the whole civilized world. In very early times the Phoenicians 
had taught the art of building walls and terraces to the Greeks ; 
the Greeks imparted this knowledge to the Etruscans and Latins; 
and from Italy, at a very late period, it spread to the nations north 
of the Alps. 

When the Indo-Europeans from the Sea of Aral and the 
Caspian Sea (with the then shape of which we are not acquainted) 
wandered westwards with their herds, what they came to was 
either immeasurable steppe or continuous and endless forest. 
In the former, so favourable for roving, there were no materials 
to be found for building houses ; so the Scythians and Sarmatians 
lived in their waggons covered with basket-work. These waggons 
were very large, being often supported not on four, but on six 
wheels. Hippocrates writes : " They are called Nomads because 
they have no houses, but live in waggons ; the smallest of which 
have four wheels, but the others six;" so that the houses on 
wheels mentioned by Pindar might be called movable houses. 
And in fact, Hippocrates continues : " These waggons are roofed 
with felt; they are built like houses, some twofold, some three- 
fold ; they protect their occupants from rain, wind, and snow, and 
are drawn sometimes by two, sometimes by three oxen." The 
women lived in the waggons, the men rode. The Slavs, who were 



STOATE ARCHITECTURE. 115 

the northern neighbours of the Sarmatians, adopted many of 
their customs, but they were not a riding or driving nation ; they 
were robbers roaming through the forests, but yet they built 
houses. What this oldest Slavo-Germano-Celtic house was like, 
we learn even now from the similar dwellings of roving nations 
on the borders of Europe and Asia ; for example, the Turkomans. 
The framework and roof consist of poles, and the two united 
form a kind of cylinder, rounded at the top. The whole is 
covered with felt, and the rectangular opening which serves for a 
door is also curtained with felt. In the sculptures on the column 
of Antoninus this kind of house is represented in a probably 
improved form, and it is so described by Greeks and Romans, 
whose reports are not contradicted by the early Middle Ages. 
In the sculptures above-mentioned the fortifications of the 
Marcomanni and Quadi, stormed by Marcus Aurelius, are dis- 
tinctly seen to consist of wicker-work bound by crossed and twisted 
ropes ; the dwellings are circular with rounded roofs, no windows, 
and square doors ; they seem to be interwoven with rushes or canes 
and bound with ropes. The houses of the Celts are similarly 
described by Strabo, and those of the remote Caledonians and 
Maeotians were still constructed in this way in the time of 
Jornandes, when their kinsmen on the continent had long adopted 
the Roman fashion. The Slavs too are described by Procopius 
as dwelling in such huts of wicker-work, which they could easily 
forsake, and build others in another place. " The Suevi," says 
Strabo, " and the neighbouring nations live in huts built only to 
last a day." Seneca describes the houses and customs of the 
•Germans and nations on the Danube in the same way. Tacitus 
afterwards reports that the Germans were ignorant of the use 
of mortar and bricks. The huts above described had no foun- 
dations, and a thief could enter them at night by digging a 
passage under ground. The roof rested simply on the walls, 
and there was no interior division, for the Alemannian law 
declared that a new-born child had lived when it had opened its 
eyes and seen the roof and the four walls ; such a house must 
have been no longer round but square, like the Dacian houses 
on Trajan's column, which besides have a window above the 



n6 STONE ARCHITECTURE. 

door. How slight the whole structure was, is proved by a law 
punishing any one who scatters to pieces another's house. It is 
natural that such houses were constantly exposed to fire: the 
enemy threw firebrands on the roof of rushes; the robber secretly 
set fire to the wood-work ; an accidental flame rapidly consumed 
the slender pillars and the dry osiers that bound them together. 
The very hearth in the centre of the house, which sent its smoke 
up to the roof and dried the wood-work, and the common 
northern custom of lighting up the house in the long winter 
evenings by means of a torch stuck in a crevice, must often have 
been the cause of destruction. Not seldom may the occupants 
sleeping on the ground have perished in the smoke and flame ; 
but, if they escaped with their lives, a new house was speedily 
built, impervious at first to the rain, unstained with soot, and 
happily free of the vermin that had infested the old habitation. 
The foremost in the great Indo-European march, the Celts, had 
on moving towards the West come upon the Iberians, who, if 
conjecture be right, were the outermost link of a great chain of 
nations, reaching from the valley of the Nile and the north coast 
of Africa, through modern Spain, to the Channel and the Atlantic 
Ocean. Did the impulse to erect the stone monuments which 
we find under different forms and names {nuragen, dolmen, crom- 
lech, etc.) in Algiers as well as in Sardinia, Western France, and 
the British Isles, belong to this race ? and had the Celts, in their 
later erections, only inherited the custom from their predecessors ? 
Was it the same impulse, arrested in the north-west at its rudest 
stage, that prompted the building of the temples of Egypt, and rose 
almost into the sphere of beauty and true art ? In consequence 
of their geographical position, the Celts very early came in 
contact with Phoenician, Grecian, and Roman civilization ; they 
learnt to sink a stone foundation into the ground, to hew stones, 
fit them and cement them with mortar, and thus settle per- 
manently on their native soil. The Germans learnt the art much 
later ; the Slavs of the East have scarcely learnt it to this day. 
Purely agricultural nations were still quite content with wooden 
houses, wicker barns (Lith. Metis, and Old Slavic kleti, outhouse, 
storeroom; Gothic hleithra, tent, arbour; while the Old Celtic 



, 



STONE ARCHITECTURE. 117 

cUtct, Irish diat/i, Cymric cluit, still retain the original mean- 
ing of wicker-work, hurdle ; French date, etc.), and with mere 
hurdles for their horses and cattle. When the Vineyard came, 
and not till then, appeared the murus (Old Irish mur) that 
enclosed it, the stone-paved street {via strata) that led past it, 
and soon connected with one another the stone hamlets (villas), 
markets (mercatus), wells (puteos), convents, churches, and ere- 
long the cities. If we could doubt that real architecture origi- 
nated in the countries around the Mediterranean, and slowly 
advanced from south to north, and from west to east, the 
history of the commonest words would prove it to be the fact. 
Our word chalk was derived from the Latin calx, which in turn 
was derived from the Greek. Our tile and mortar are from the 
Latin tegula, mortarium ; our tower from turn's ; our fenster 
(window) and soller (attic), from the fenestra and solarium ; our 
post and pillar from postis and pilarium ; our chimney from 
caminata, and so on (note 40). When the Slavs migrated into the 
regions of the Oder and Danube, they cannot have been acquainted 
with any masonry, for all their expressions for such work are 
derived partly from Byzantium, partly from Germany, and a few 
from the Turkish language — as the science of philology proves. 
Bohemian Prague on the Moldau is a city of splendid houses, for 
it lies close to the European West, and was built with its assistance. 
Russian Moscow was, and partly is, a mere wooden camp, like 
the Budine settlements described by Herodotus ; and if the 
popular songs bestowed the epithet " white-stoned" on their 
imperial residence, on account of the few stone edifices it con- 
tained (which were built by Italians fetched for the purpose), it 
only proves that such another wonder was not to be found in their 
sphere of experience. When the Roman-German West had once 
mastered the southern mode of building, it reared its towers and 
spires in longing aspiration to the skies, almost to the height 
of the Egyptian pyramids — this, however, was a morbid barbaric 
impulse, from which the balanced nature of the Greek had pre- 
served him. The terraced horizontal architecture of the Medi- 
terranean city, rising on all sides up to a castle-crowned hill, or 
amphitheatrically surrounding some beautiful bay, is hardly met 



n8 STONE ARCHITECTURE. 

with beyond the district of the olive ; from that point to the north 
begins the pointed Gothic architecture of the mystic-minded 
masters of the architectural guilds. We do not know exactly how 
high were the Babylonian-Assyrian terraces of brick ; what is still 
left standing is about as lofty as the tallest trees, the sequoia of 
California, and the eucalyptus of Australia — from four to five 
hundred feet : thus far it is possible for organic life and the art of 
man to raise themselves above this planet. As once the Hamitic- 
Semitic stone supplanted the primitive material, wood; so this in its 
turn, is being supplanted, in our new technical and mechanical 
civilization, by glass and iron — glass, an almost incorporeal thing • 
and iron, found late and only intended for implements — the 
materials of a demonic and magic art that would have seemed to 
the ancients incomprehensible as an edifice of vapour, or else 
an illusion of the senses, like the pearly bridge of Iris. 



BEER. 

When the Roman Empire was complete, its limits closely cor- 
responded with those of the vine and olive. Where in the north the 
climate was too cold, or in the south too hot for the vine, or where 
olive oil was no longer an article of daily consumption, there also 
the Roman no longer ruled, or only temporarily- and there ended 
the world of the ancients. Even modern Europe may be fairly 
divided into a wine-and-oil land and a beer-and-bntier land : the 
region of the first is that part of Europe which leans towards the 
Mediterranean Sea; the region of the last the part that slants 
towards the North Sea and Baltic. In the most ancient times it was 
far otherwise. On collecting the passages relating to the history of 
beer and butter scattered through the writings of the Greeks and 
Romans, we are astonished at the extent of the sphere in which 
both these articles, now considered as especially belonging to the 
north, were found ; and at the fact that whole countries and 
nations have abandoned their use. The gift of Bacchus supplanted 
the old native turbid drink boiled out of grain, and Minerva's boon 
banished the fat that shepherds had churned out of the milk of 
sheep, cows, and mares. It was like the victory of a new religion 
and foreign manners over old barbaric ways, the attachment to 
which was very slowly lost, first among the chiefs and nobles, and 
at last among the mass of the people. We are informed by 
Herodotus and others that the Egyptians — that primitive pre- 
Semitic race, which perhaps had developed a peculiar civilization 
ages before the Indo-Europeans invaded Europe — used a drink 
made out of barley. In the poems of ^Eschylus, a King of Argos 
cries to the Danaids, who had come from Egypt, that here they 
will find a manly population and not drinkers of barley-wine. In 
places where the soil would not permit the production of wine, the 
god Osiris himself had taught the people to make a drink of 



BEER. 



barley, almost equal to wine in pleasantness and strength. "The 
Egyptians," says the Academician Dio, " who are a people much 
inclined to drink, have invented a substitute for wine for those too 
poor to buy it ; namely, wine made from barley : when this is 
drunk, it makes men merry; they sing and dance, and behave 
exactly as if full of sweet wine." And in Strabo's time, the citizens 
of Alexandria — a place only existing since the Macedonian period 
with a very mixed population — generally drank the same old 
Egyptian beverage. 

Theopbrastus is the first to mention its name, and under this 
name zythos, Latin zythum^ the drink is often ailuded to by Greek 
and Latin authors. We can quite understand that the Egyptians 
would try to vary the taste of the sweet slimy beverage by the 
addition of pungent substances, and the fact is proved by a passage 
in Columella, which speaks of the bitter lupine. Strabo says even 
of the more distant Ethiopians that they lived on millet and barley, 
and prepared a drink out of those products. The English travellers 
who have lately penetrated to the sources of the Nile, found a 
kind of raw intoxicating beer in use among the half-negro tribes, 
who drink it out of gourds. Among the pre-Indo-European 
Iberian race in Spain, which was genealogically or historically 
connected with the Libyans in Africa, beer was drunk in the 
earliest times. Pliny calls Spain an " excellent beer-land," where 
the people knew how to keep and improve it. The customs 
attributed by Strabo to the Iberian tribes living near the Atlantic 
coast are so singular and wild, that when the same author says 
the Lusitanians drank beer, we must suppose that this was an 
ancient Lusitanian habit, and not derived from the Celts. " But 
wine," adds Strabo, " is very rare among them," from which we 
infer that at that early time the vine was at least beginning to be 
cultivated in the land where now it rules alone. Polybius men- 
tions a characteristic trait of attachment to the national drink 
in a half-Grecianized, and so half-civilized, Iberian king. His 
palace is in all respects a copy of that of the Phaeacian king 
in Homer — and even that was barbaric — with one exception ; in 
the centre of the building stand gold and silver vessels filled with 
barley-juice. It makes a similar impression when we read of the 



BEER. 121 



heroic Numantians, that when on the point of engaging in battle, 
they feasted on half-raw meat — like modern Englishmen — and 
raised their spirits with the fermented juice of wheat or other grain. 
Pliny first tells us the names of these Spanish drinks, ccelia and 
cerea. Strabo relates that the Ligurians, probably a branch of the 
Iberians, ate meat and drank beer. 

Another set of originally beer-drinking nations in the south-east 
of the continent belong however to the great Indo-European 
family. Archilochus speaks of the nearly related Phrygians and 
Thracians drinking bruton, barley-wine or beer, as early as 700 
B.C. Hecataeus says that the Paeonians, a people of Thrace, 
drank bruton made of barley, and parabia made from millet with 
the admixture of a spicy root called konyze. East of the Phrygians 
lived the Armenians, of whose use of a similar beverage Xenophon 
was an eye-witness. The celebrated Ten Thousand, after coming 
down from the Carduchian mountains, rested in some Armenian 
villages on their way to the Chalybes. Among other things, they 
found there large tubs of what we must call beer, still brimful of 
the barley; the drink, which was sucked through straws, was 
intoxicating when unmixed with water, but very pleasant to those 
accustomed to it. Xenophon does not say what name the natives 
gave their drink ; but that the taste for beer requires to be learnt 
is proved by what is even now observed in inhabitants of southern 
countries, who at first dislike the brown drink, but after some 
practice often become passionately fond of it (note 41). We learn 
from authors of a later period, that the Illyrians and Pannonians 
called beer sabaia or sabaium ; but by that time it had become a 
poor and common beverage, only drunk by the vulgar, while the 
better classes, who already spoke Latin and Greek, had long 
since drunk wine instead. When the Emperor Valens besieged 
Chalcedon, the men on the walls mocked at him, calling him a 
sabaiarius, beer-drinker. Cassius Dio, who ought to know them, 
having governed Dalmatia and Upper Pannonia, pictures the 
Pannonians as a poor northern people, living in a wintry climate 
which produced neither wine nor oil, and not only eating but 
drinking their millet and barley. More than two centuries later, 
the remarkable report of Priscus, who traversed the Pannonian 



BEER. 



plains in 448 a.d., with the Greek embassy sent to King Attila, 
furnishes a vivid picture of the country and the habits of its 
mixed races. Instead of wheat the embassy were everywhere 
supplied with millet, and instead of wine with mead — so-called by 
the natives ; while the servants got millet and a drink prepared 
from barley, which the barbarians called camum. But we are not 
told which barbarians used this name; certainly not the Huns, 
for the word is more ancient than the arrival of that horde in 
Europe. In Ulpian's Digest (beginning of the third century) 
ca??ium is not to be reckoned in legacies as wine ; and in the so- 
called edict of Diocletian of the year 301 the maximum price of 
camum is prescribed among other things. The word seems to be 
Celtic, and may have become domesticated in Pannonia during 
the great Celtic migrations, or been brought there by Roman 
soldiers. All this proves that in what is now Hungary, in Illyria 
and Thrace, that is, in the larger northern half of the Greco-Turkish 
peninsula ; in Phrygia, Armenia, Egypt, Spain and Portugal, and 
down to the mountains of the Genoese coast, beer — now almost 
unknown to the common people in those countries — was once in 
general use. 

Turning to the inhabitants of Central and Northern Europe, 
the Celts, Germans, Lithuanians, and Slavs — all of them nations 
of Indo-European blood — we get our oldest account of the food 
and drink of the first-named people, the Celts, from Pytheas of 
Massilia, who probably lived in the time of Aristotle, or soon after. 
Strabo reports him as saying of the nations with whom he became 
acquainted on his coasting voyage to the Northern Sea, that they 
had " hardly any garden fruits or domestic animals, that they fed 
on millet and other herbs, berries, and roots ; while those who 
cultivated corn and honey prepared their drink also out of those 
substances " (therefore beer and mead). The winter of the 
Scythians, that is, of northern peoples in general, the long nights, 
the fur clothing, subterranean dwellings, and lastly the fer??iented 
drink instead of wine, are described by Virgil (Georg. III. 376-383) 
in almost the same words as by Tacitus afterwards : 

"Et pocula lseti 
Fermento atque acidis imitantur vitea sorbis" 



BEER. 



"3 



At the beginning of the first century B.C. beer was the popular 
beverage of the Celts in Central France, while the upper classes 
already drank Massiliote wine. Celtic beer is not seldom men- 
tioned by later authors ; in Northern France, Belgium, and the 
British Isles it held its ground both under the Roman Empire and 
through the Middle Ages, and does so to the present day. The 
Emperor Julian, who had seen and no doubt tasted it, but who 
clung to classical manners and recoiled from the barbaric, whether 
east or north, ridicules the Parisian pseudo-Bacchus in a well- 
known epigram, "Child of the bearded barley, wilt thou call thyself 
Dionysus? " and so on. Ammianus knows the Gauls as a people 
fond of wine, but forced to put up with beer and cider as substi- 
tutes. The korma of Posidonius, koun?ii of Dioscorides, still lives 
in Celtic languages, with the usual change of m into v and/ The 
word may be of the same origin as the Spanish cerea, in which 
case both name and thing may either have come from Spain to 
the Celts, or travelled with the Celts from Gaul to Celtiberia. In 
a more developed form, as cervesia, cerevisia, it occurs first in Pliny, 
then quite commonly in the Middle Ages, and still exists in the 
Romance tongues, as French cervoise, etc. Another Celtic word, 
brace, meaning first a kind of grain (spelt), then malt, beer-spice, 
and beer itself, has, with its numerous offshoots and the general 
sense of " fermentation " running through them, found its way 
into Middle Latin, the N. Romance tongues, and even German 
A proof of the deeply rooted custom of beer-drinking among the 
British Celts is afforded by the life of St. Bridget. That saint re- 
peated the miracle of the marriage at Cana, with the difference that 
she changed the water into beer. She also increased the store of 
beer, milk, and butter by a mere glance of the eye. 

East of the Celts, the Germans became the more addicted to 
beer-drinking the more they turned their attention to agriculture. 
Caesar does not speak of beer as a German drink, but a century and 
a half later Tacitus does ; though Pliny, when he mentions beer, is 
silent as to the Germans. These, when pressing forward to the Lower 
Rhine and the sources of the Danube, must have soon adopted the 
use of beer from the Celts; those on the Lower Danube must 
have found the beverage among the primitive Thracians and Pan- 



124 BEER. 



nonians, and were probably till then unacquainted with it ; but it 
is a well-known fact that barbarians adopt nothing more readily 
than the means of intoxication. Grimm derives the German word 
bier from the Latin bibere, and the North-German word ale (which 
passed to the Finns and Lithuanians) from the Latin oleum. 
Those who are startled by this, must remember that beer is a pro- 
duct and a pleasure of the agriculturist, and that its manufacture, 
even when rude, demands a knowledge of technics only possible 
where agriculture is practised ; that there was a period when the 
Germans roved through Europe as a pastoral nation ; that at the 
period when we first become acquainted with them, they were only 
beginning to adopt a settled mode of life, and that it is therefore 
foolish to regard beer and beer-drinking as originally German, and 
inseparable from the essence and idea of Germanism ; that, if the 
use and brewing of beer had been the ruling characteristic custom 
of the Germans, the ancients would not have been so chary of 
mentioning it, and would not have withheld from us the names of 
beer and ale, for they reported all the Thracian, Spanish, and Celtic 
names of the things that struck them as strange ; that, finally, the 
nearest neighbours of the Germans, the Prussians, in the time of 
Wulfstan and King Alfred, drank only mead and fermented mares' 
milk, and were ignorant of beer, which allows us to make certain 
inferences as to the Germans in the earlier stages of their civiliza- 
tion. In any case, the raw fermentum which was drunk in the 
" subterranean dens " of the Germans of Tacitus, would be very 
distasteful to their modern and fastidious descendants. To say 
nothing else, let it be remembered that the hop-plant only reached 
Germany (apparently from the east) in consequence of the German 
movement against E.ome, though it has now frequently run wild, 
and that the mixing of this narcotic plant with beer only came into 
gradual use in the Middle Ages. It is true that St. Columban, 
about the year 600, once found a cupa filled with beer, and hold- 
ing about twenty-six modii, among the Suevians, who were about 
to offer it to their god Wodan ; but in the course of the Middle 
Ages beer went almost entirely out of use in South Germany, 
owing to the same agencies as in South and Central France ; so 
that Bavaria became entirely a wine-land, till in recent times North- 



BEER. 



125 



German beer, by improved methods of preparation, especially the 
art of making it keep, and by cheapness of price, again recovered 
the ground lost. Beer, which at the beginning of European history 
was chiefly a Celtic beverage, is now considered a distinguishing 
mark of the German man and German manners ; so completely 
do modes of civilization, in the course of long periods, shift from 
land to land and from nation to nation, and so easily is he deceived 
who has his eye on the present alone ! At the same time, we allow 
that malt, that is, the melted, softened, is a true German word (so 
the all-healing " extract of malt " can boast of being at least half 
German) ; but brewing is a word whose origin cannot be decided 
with any certainty : the Thracian bruton looks as though it must 
mean the brewed; the Lithuanian bruwele, brewer, is isolated, and 
must have been borrowed from the German. The Gothic leithus 
( = sicera, intoxicating drink), which is also found in the other 
Teutonic tongues, and has only lately died out in High German, 
seems identical with the Old Irish lind, now linn, lionn, leann or 
llyn, according to the dialect, so that leithus stands for linthus, and' 
is probably borrowed from the Celtic, especially as it is wanting in 
the Slavic. 

Still farther east, the Lithuanians have borrowed their alus 
(beer) from their German neighbours, but the Slavs have formed 
their own pivo quite in an abstract manner from the verb piti, 
to drink. The Old Slavic olu, olovina, sicera, New Slavic ol, 
cerevisia, and Wallachian olovin, have the same origin as our 
ale, Old Norse d'l. Another Slavic word, braga, braha. bray a 
(a common drink similar to beer, Lithuanian, broga), points to 
the Celtic brace. As it is wanting in the Teutonic languages (a 
sign of late and foreign derivation), and as it may have been bor- 
rowed by the Lithuanians from the Slavic, perhaps after the in- 
troduction of brandy, it may have reached the Slavs after the 
time when Celtic races had wandered back again to Bohemia 
and Pannonia, and into the Danubian districts. Of the two 
Finnic and Esthonian expressions for the commonest small beer 
(potus vilissimus ex hordeo), kalja, kalli and taari, taar, the first 
resembles the Spanish calia; not that we would venture to deduce 
from it an Iberian-Finnish relationship or connexion. 



126 MEAD. 



In the lime-tree forests of the east of Europe, among the 
nomads and half-nomads of the Volga region, quite at the back 
of the Slavs, the intoxicating drink made of honey played a 
greater part than beer, and was certainly much older. It may be 
presumed that mead was a primitive drink of the Indo-Germans 
when they migrated into Europe, and that it only, like so many 
other things, lasted longer in the east of the continent. In 
Greece, where beer-drinking was always considered a barbaric 
custom, we find here and there some traces of a drink made 
of honey having preceded the wine period. The Taulantians, an 
Illyrian people, made wine from honey. "When the honey is 
squeezed out of the combs," says Aristotle (besides other pro- 
cesses), "an agreeable strong drink, like wine, is produced. 
Some persons succeeded in producing the same in Greece, dif- 
ferent in no way from old wine; but afterwards, with all their 
exertions, they could not hit upon the right mixture." It is 
perhaps a sign of the abundance of honey in the regions beyond 
the Ister, that the Thracians in the time of Herodotus said the 
country was so full of bees that it was impossible to penetrate 
into it. The same thing was once believed of Liineburg Heath. 
Mead is further distinguished as a Scythian beverage, made from 
the honey of wild bees. The Byzantine envoy Priscus gives the 
native Pannonian name medos^ which is identical with the Old 
Irish mid, Old Cambrian med, and the Slavic medu; the last being 
not only honey and mead, but sometimes (in composition) standing 
for wine, like the Greek methic. The modern Lithuanians dis- 
tinguish medus^ honey, from middus, mead ; in the corresponding 
German word the meaning of honey has entirely disappeared. 
Even now in Slav countries beer is not the popular, indispensable, 
traditional drink; it is true mead also has become rarer every 
year in Russia and Poland, principally because sugar has put an 
end to bee-keeping ; its place is taken by that devilish invention, 
brandy, which decimates the present generation, and poisons the 
life-springs of the next. 



BUTTER. 

The history of butter runs parallel to that of beer. Butter may 
be termed a product of the art and habits of the shepherd, as 
beer is of those of the husbandman. Milk kept in skins would 
of course, when carried about on horseback or in a waggon — and 
all northern nations rode in waggons — be churned into butter, 
and the effect produced on cream when exposed to the warmth 
of the stove was similar. The butter thus separated could be 
used either for eating, for anointing the hair, or as salve for wounds. 
The Greeks and Romans of the best period were ignorant of 
butter, and there is no sign of their having been acquainted with 
it before the introduction of olive oil. In spite of this, rather 
early testimony describes the nations in the vicinity of the two 
classic lands as making butter^ which they must therefore have 
learned to produce after the dispersion of the nations. That 
great traveller, Solon, speaks of the fat obtained by stirring milk, 
and uses it as a simile for the gain which selfish leaders know 
how to extract from political disturbance. Before the time of 
Herodotus, Hecataeus said that the Pseonians on the Strymon, 
the same that lived in pile dwellings and brewed two kinds of 
beer, "used salve made of the oil of milk." The comic poet 
Anaxandrides, who flourished about the middle of the fourth 
•century B.C., speaks of rough-haired, butter-eating men sitting at 
the table of the Thracian king Kotys, who married his daughter 
to Iphicrates. Herodotus had heard a vague report of a Scythian 
mode of treating the milk of mares ; after saying that the nomadic 
Scythians used to blind their slaves, he continues, " they make 
them sit round the hollow wooden milk-vessels and stir (or swing) 
them round and round ; the stuff that rises to the top is skimmed, 



128 BUTTER. 



and considered more valuable than what sinks to the bottom. " 
Hippocrates describes the process more particularly. " The Scy- 
thians," he says, " pour mares' milk into wooden vessels, which 
they then shake; thereby the parts are separated, and the fat, 
which they call boutyron, being light, swims at the top, while the 
heavier portion, sinking to the bottom, is taken out, dried, and 
thickened, and is then called horse-cheese ; in the middle is the 
whey." This knowledge of the substance and the name was no 
doubt obtained from Greek colonists on the Pontic coast (note 
42). However, Aristotle seems either ignorant of, or not to have 
noticed, the general use of butter, at least he never mentions the 
name, production, or use of butter in his long description of the 
milk of animals ; at the very most a few passing words might be 
supposed to relate to butter. By the physicians butyrum is now 
and then mentioned as a medicament ; but Pliny, and even 
Galen, still think it necessary to explain both the word and the 
origin and use of the article to their readers. We may presume 
that as the Thracians and Scythians made butter, the Phrygians 
would do so too; and in fact Hippocrates has an expression, 
pikerion, that seems to indicate Phrygian butter. A small quantity 
of butter — very small compared with the other articles necessary 
for the royal table — is mentioned as being daily furnished for the 
Persian court. The butter is named along with sesam oil and tere- 
binth oil, while the absence of olive oil from the list is characteristic. 
A verse in the Old Testament shows that the Jews, at least at 
a certain period, were acquainted with butter ; Proverbs xxx. 33 : 
" Surely the churning of milk bringeth forth butter." The same 
thing seems true of the half-Semitic island of Cyprus, where butter 
was called elphos (Hesychius), which Gesenius explains as Phoeni- 
cian, but John Schmidt as the Sanskrit sarpis. In the " Periplus 
maris Erythraei" (written under Titus and Domitian), it is said 
that butter was brought from India to the ports of the Red Sea, 
and that tropical land is spoken of as rich in rice, wool, sesam 
oil, and butter ; wounded elephants were healed there by being 
made to swallow butter, or by having their wounds smeared with 
it. Strabo says that in Arabia, in the country of King Aretas, 
the army of ^Elius Gallus could only get butter instead of oil. 



BUTTER. 



129 



From Strabo also we learn that the Ethiopians of the utmost 
south used butter and fat, and the Lusitanians in the far west, 
butter instead of oil. No doubt this Indian, Arabian, Ethiopian, 
and Lusitanian butter was a liquid fat, just as, in the present 
time, the Bedouin Arabs are greedy drinkers of the butter they 
obtain from the milk of their sheep and goats. At the feast 
held in Sicily in honour of the return of the Erycinian Venus, 
the whole neighbourhood around her temple smelt of butter, 
as a proof that the goddess had really returned from Africa. 
The temple on the promontory of Eryx originally belonged 
to the Elymians, a nation whose origin is doubtful and hidden 
in legends. Whether they were a remnant of the Iberian race 
spread through the islands of the western Mediterranean, or had 
really immigrated from Asia, they are spoken of as a cow-keeping 
race, and worshipped a corresponding deity, whose presence was 
announced by the butter, whether used as ointment on the hair 
and body or steaming in the pan. Pliny speaks of barbarians in 
general, which from his point of view meant principally Germans, 
as " delighting in butter, the possession of which distinguishes the 
rich from the poor." The rich were able to keep butter, because 
they did not immediately consume the milk of their large herds. 
Pliny's description of the making of butter, however, is confused 
and unpractical, another proof that the article was foreign to 
the classic world. In another place he remarks that the more 
civilized and half-Romanized races used butter, as well as milk 
and eggs, in making pastry. At this time, then, appeared the 
art of making cakes, which had remained undeveloped among 
the Greeks and Romans for want of butter, and because of the 
very slight use they made of yeast — the use of which is likewise a 
Northern custom. It is remarkable enough that the word butter 
came to most nations of Western and Central Europe in a round- 
about way from the Pontus Euxinus across Greece and Italy — 
two countries which scarcely knew and did not value the article 
designated by that word. Perhaps a trace of its origin is pre- 
served in the Magyar word vai ; Lapp, wuoi ; Finnic and Esthc- 
nian woi\ woi'd, etc. 

The art of rendering butter, by means of repeated washing, 

9 



[30 



BUTTER. 



patting, and salting, as pure and firm as we now see it, seems to 
have originated among the North-German races. Even now the 
difference between the butter of North and of South Germany 
consists in the mode of preparation j in North Germany the butter 
is salted^ as in Scandinavia and England; in South Germany 
butter is eaten fresh, and food is prepared with schmalz (the 
smelted, melted), that is, liquid butter. In the Alemannian 
districts (not in the Swabian) this butter-schmalz is called anke 
(a word that Grimm considers akin to ungere\ and also schmutz. 
The Scandinavians call butter smear (Swedish smo'r, smdrja, etc., 
like our O.H.Germ. anchun-smero, anc-sm'ero). Salbe, salve, may 
also have been a primitive German word for butter. The Slavs 
have the same word for butter as for oil ; maslo, literally a thing 
to smear with {mdzati), thus agreeing with the above German 
expressions. Both nations, Germans as well as Slavs, smeared 
their hair, it would seem, with liquid butter, which when it turned 
rank, would not diffuse the best of odours. That the Celts, at 
least those of Galatia in Asia Minor, used to anoint themselves 
with evil-smelling butter is proved by an anecdote in Plutarch. A 
Lacedaemonian lady visited Berenice, the wife of King Dei'otarus ; 
when they came within smelling distance, they simultaneously 
turned their backs on each other, the odour of ointment being 
apparently repugnant to the one, and that of butter to the other. 
In out-of-the-way villages of northern countries this custom has 
not yet died out among the women and children, but elsewhere it 
has been supplanted by the use of pomatum, in which, as the 
name indicates, some sweet-scented fruit (Ital. porno) is mixed. 
Originally it was also a dye for the hair, and only in recent times 
has it become a mere ointment. The invention, like that of 
soap, seems to be an old Belgian one, for the ancient Gauls, like 
their Parisian descendants of to-day, were artists of the toilette. 

How can we more fittingly conclude our remarks on the three 
primitive plants of the earliest higher civilization — the Vine, 
Olive, and Fig-tree — than by quoting the significant parable in 
the ninth chapter of Judges ? I will write it down, as I fear the 
Book containing it nowadays is but seldom read : " The trees 






VINE. OLIVE. FIG. 131 



went forth on a time to anoint a king over them ; and they said 
unto the Olive-tree, Reign thou over us. But the Olive-tree said 
unto them, Should I leave my fatness, wherewith by me they 
honour God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees? 
And the trees said to the Fig-tree, Come thou, and reign over us. 
But the Fig-tree said unto them, Should I forsake my sweetness, 
and my good fruit, and go to be promoted over the trees ? Then 
said the trees unto the Vine, Come thou, and reign over us. And 
the Vine said unto them, Should I leave my wine, which cheereth 
God and man, and go to be promoted over the trees? Then said 
all the trees unto the Bramble, Come thou, and reign over us. 
And the Bramble said unto the trees, If in truth ye anoint me 
king over you, then come and put your trust in my shadow : and 
if not, let fire come out of the Bramble, and devour the cedars of 
Lebanon." What a picture of Syrian nature and Semitic life ! 
Those monstrous thorns and prickly plants of the desert, the 
acacia bushes — which a man cannot approach unless he be armed 
with long iron prongs to grasp and cut — become as dry as 
skeletons in the summer heat, and afford no " shade ; " if by 
accident they catch fire, the conflagration spreads to the very 
horizon, devouring the fruit-trees it finds on its way. So the 
destructive fires of conquest and despotism raged all over Asia, 
devouring all humble homes, all hives of peaceful industry. The 
terrible majesty of the rulers of Nineveh and Babylon glowed 
merciless, like the sun in summer, burning up nations as 
the thornbush did the cedars of Lebanon; while the Olive, the 
Fig-tree, the Vine, resembled the man who, within his small 
province, accomplishes works of peace, and benefits mankind. 

And to this day, politics and "music" — in the Greek sense — 
are sworn enemies. Our great poet experienced it when he 
attempted to " soar above the trees," and truth and love and, 
above all, poetry, which cheereth God and man, threatened to 
dry up within him. From that time he hated Revolution, which 
seemed to him the flaming thornbush that destroyed both garden 
and plantation. 



FLAX. HEMP. 

(TJNuM USITATISSIMUM.I (CANNABIS SATIVA.) 

In what part of the world flax originally appeared is one of the 
many questions relating to cultivated plants that cannot yet be 
answered decisively. The dry rocky soil of the Mediterranean 
countries, the long summer drought and the sudden floods of 
autumn, not being favourable to the growth of flax, its original 
home has been sought in the colder and more humid regions of 
Central Europe. But Egypt and Colchis show that it is not the 
southern heat but the want of moisture that prevents the thriving 
of the plant in the classic lands. When we hear of modern 
travellers finding wild flax in Northern India, on the Altai moun- 
tains, or at the foot of the Caucasus, and of its "growing 
spontaneously all over Macedonia and Thrace," there is always 
the possibility of a plant so long and extensively cultivated having 
merely escaped the custody of man and gone wild in those places. 
The twofold use to which both flax and hemp were put is another 
important fact in their history ; namely, the use of their oily fruit 
for food, and that of their fibre for ropes and tissues. The two uses 
are not always found combined on the same soil and by the same 
nation, and it is still a question which of the two first led to the 
cultivation of the plant. In modern India linseed is pressed for 
oil, but the plant itself is not utilized ; in Abyssinia, too, it only 
serves for food. Herodotus says that the Scythians threw hemp 
seed on hot stones at funeral ceremonies, at once purifying and 
intoxicating themselves with the fumes ; it is added immediately 
after, that the Thracians moreover wove the plant into clothes 
very similar to linen, implying that the Scythians did not. We 



FLAX. 



133 



find the Greeks very early baking linseed, as well as poppy and 
sesam seeds, in honey, by way of pastry. During the Peloponne- 
sian war, when the Athenians blockaded the Isle of Sphacteria, 
divers brought to the besieged skins full of poppy-seed in honey 
and pounded linseed. " In Italy, north of the Po," says Pliny, 
" there was formerly a very sweet rustic food made of linseed, 
which is now used only in sacrifices ; " — from the locality and the 
sacrificial use we may conclude that this was an ancient Celtic or 
Ligurian custom. 

Far richer than the history of linseed as food is the history of 
flax as a material for manufacture. The cultivation of flax in 
Egypt and Western Asia goes back to the remotest antiquity. 
Linen stuffs and clothes, napkins and fillets, tents and nets, ropes 
and sails, are met with in universal use among the Egyptians, 
among the Phoenicians, and in the Old Testament. The mural 
paintings of ancient Egypt represent the whole process of pre- 
paring the flax ; the steeping, beetling, combing, bleaching, etc. 
The microscope has proved that the mummies were wrapped in 
linen (note 43), although assertions to the contrary have been 
made. When we consider the length of the linen strips so used, 
the number of the dead — it would have been an abomination to 
bury a corpse in wool — and the universal use of linen as clothing 
by the living ; when we hear that the only costume of the priests 
was of pure linen, they being only permitted to wear an upper 
mantle of woollen when outside the temple ; and when we consider 
the large exportation going on in those days, we are astonished 
at the quantity of linen which must have been produced in the 
regions of the Nile. The world-wide fame of the delicate and 
artistic fabrics which came from the Nile, and the quality of the 
linen found on many mummies, prove that the Egyptian excelled 
in this manufacture. King Amasis made gifts of linen corselets to 
the Lacedaemonians, and to the temple of Athena at Lindos in 
the Island of Rhodes, interwoven with figures of animals and 
embroidered with gold and cotton, the fibres being of such fine- 
ness that each thread contained three hundred and sixty of them 
(note 44). The identity of the Greek chiton, kithon (tunic) with 
the Phoenician for linen, kitonet, keionet, proves that the latter 



134 FLAX. HEMP. 



bartered linen to the inhabitants of the Mediterranean coasts for 
other wares. The Phoenicians, in their turn, procured the material 
not only from Egypt, but from Palestine, where, as the Old Testa- 
ment teaches us, flax was universally spun by the women, and 
made into clothes, girdles, laces, lamp-wicks, etc. As the cotton 
shrub {Gossyphim herbaceum) also grew in some of the warmer 
parts of Palestine, it may be that cotton fabrics and fine linen 
were not always distinguished in language or commerce. Phoe- 
nician ships were not only impelled by means of oars, but also 
by linen sails ; but what were the ropes used in the ships made 
of? Perhaps of the Egyptian plant byblus, for flax seems hardly 
strong enough. When Xerxes erected his great bridge of boats 
over the Hellespont many centuries later, the Egyptians had to 
furnish the necessary ropes of byblus, and the Phoenician ropes 
of leuko-linon, white flax. Salmasius understood this to mean 
macerated flax •, in contrast to raw. But the whiteness of the ropes 
that support a bridge is of no consequence, strength only is 
required, and leuko-linon means no other than the leukea, leukaia 
(spart-grass, Stipa tenacissima), which Athenseus says was procured 
from Spain by Hiero II. for his splendid ship. In Xerxes' time 
the Phoenicians had long known and used this Spanish plant. 
The Babylonians too, more in the interior of the Asian continent, 
wore linen tunics. Strabo already praises the Babylonian town 
Borsippa for its linen, and what was true of his time, will, in 
such a stationary country, have been also true of a much earlier 
period. Farther north the cultivation of flax flourished at Col- 
chis, that is, in the marshy regions at the south-western foot of 
the Caucasus, where it grew so abundantly and was of such good 
quality that Herodotus thought it another proof of the identity of 
race between the Colchians and Egyptians (note 45). This 
Colchian flax and the fine flax of Carthage were used for all kinds 
of nets. The whole of the East was acquainted with the art of 
dyeing linen, interweaving it with lustrous threads, embroidering 
it with arabesques or figures in gold-thread, etc. ; and linen gar- 
ments, ornamented in this manner, and of an almost transparent 
fineness, formed the gorgeou:; costume worn at the courts and 
harems of the Great King and his satraps. The priests of Western 



FLAX. 



*35 



Asia, those of Jehovah not excepted, were clad, like the Egyptians, 
in pure white linen, the symbol of light and innocence. When 
the high priest entered the Holy of Holies, he put off his gay outtr 
garment, and assumed one woven of white byssus. This Egyptian 
and Asiatic custom was afterwards adopted in Europe by the 
Pythagoreans, the Orphic priests, the priests of Isis, and by 
penitents and pilgrims ; it is preserved to this day in the white 
surplices used in Christian churches. 

The gaily embroidered linen satis and flags with gold and 
purple borders, and the similar awnings used on the ships and 
barks of the Oriental despots were famous ; and this half-barbarie 
luxury was adopted by the Greek kings. Theseus, sailing home 
from Crete, hoisted a purple sail as a sign of his safety; and 
Alcibiades, triumphantly returning to his native land from banish- 
ment, ventured to run into harbour on a trireme with purple sails. 
Cleopatra's ship at Actium had also such a sail, by the help of 
which, towards the close of the battle, she made for the open sea. 

Another certainly very ancient use of flax in Asia was to make it 
into linen corselets, by which, in war or the chase, the sharp arrows 
of the enemy, or the teeth and claws of lions and panthers, were 
blunted. The Phoenician and Philistine crews in the armada of 
Xerxes wore linen corselets ; so did the Assyrian warriors. Xeno- 
phon says that the king of the Susians assumed the customary linen 
armour; and the Ten Thousand found the same sort of war clothing 
among the Chalybes in Armenia. The Mossynceci, a Pontic nation, 
wore tunics down to the knee, as coarse as the sacks into which the 
Greeks of that time used to stuff their bed-cushions when remov- 
ing or travelling. In the Carthaginian army, which consisted of 
mercenaries of many nations, the linen corselets was a common 
piece of armour. 

That the Greeks of the epic period could not be ignorant of a 
product anciently known throughout Asia, goes without saying. 
The only question is, whether the linen clothing mentioned by 
Homer was imported, or whether the raw material was native, and 
spun and woven into stuffs by the women ? It is evident from 
the name, and probably from the connexion in which it occurs, 
that othone, the fine white linen garment worn by women, that 



136 FLAX. HEMP. 



a product of Asiatic and not of Grecian skill. In the Iliad, we 
see Helen — a queen who was already acquainted with Semitic 
and Phrygian luxury, and had just woven a purple garment on 
which the battles of the Trojans and Achseans were embroidered — 
hurrying from her chamber wrapped in white linen. On Achilles' 
shield there are figured — 

" The maids in soft cymars of linen dress'd ; 
The youths all graceful in the glossy vest." 

In the wonderful Phseacian palace some fifty maidens, dressed in 
close-woven garments that drip with oil, 

' ' Form the household train ; 
Some turn the mill, or sift the golden grain ; 
Some ply the loom ; their busy fingers move 
Like poplar leaves when Zephyr fans the grove." 

The fine bed-sheets for which Homer uses a European name, linon^ 
not to be found in the East, might still be of foreign make. 
Linen, besides fleeces and woollen stuffs, was indispensable for a 
well-prepared bed : 

"Meantime, Achilles' slaves prepared a bed, 
With fleeces, carpets, and soft linen spread." 

The same description applies to the couch prepared for Ulysses 
on board the Phaeacian ship. Of what material the sails of the 
Homeric ships were made, the Odyssey teaches us by the 
constant epithet of " white sails," that is, linen; and when Calypso 
brings cloths (pharea) to Ulysses, of which to make sails for his 
new ship, the adjectives used, being the same as those which 
describes Calypso's own garment (pharos), show that these cloths 
were also linen. Flax, however, could not have been the material 
of the ropes. Of what these consisted is sufficiently shown by 
passages in the Odyssey. The broken mast of Ulysses' ship was 
bound with a rope of neafs leather, which is also described as 
" well-twisted," therefore consisting of many smaller thongs twisted 
together. But, besides straps of neat's leather, we find in the 
Odyssey a rope of byblos, with which Philcetius causes the outer 
gate to be fastened : 



FLAX. 137 

" Secures the court and with a cable ties 
The utmost gate (the cable strongly wrought 
Of byblus reed, a ship from Egypt brought)." 

Now, as these cables of Egyptian bast must have been brought to 
the Greeks by Semitic sailors, the cloth of Calypso's dress, and 
sail-cloth in general, may have been also imported from foreign 
lands. Homer further uses the word linon for fishing-lines and 
nets, and for the thread on the spindle. Patroclus thrusts his 
sword into the jaws of Thestor, and drags him out of his chariot 
as an angler draws out a fish with a flaxen line. Sarpedon calls 
to Hector to beware of falling into the toils of the enemy, as if 
caught in the meshes of a linen-net. Linon appears in the symbol 
of the Fates spinning the thread of life : Achilles is to suffer the 
destiny spun for him by the Fates with linen thread at his birth. 

When we remember that even now raw flax is sent by ship- 
loads to the southern countries, there to be spun by the women 
and girls sitting outside their houses, or while tending their sheep 
and goats, we may well imagine the women of Homer (and, like 
them, the Fates) spinning Egyptian, Palestine, or Colchian flax 
into thread and weaving it into nets. It is another question 
whether the word linon be not a much older one in Europe, 
known there before the introduction of flax, and signifying fibre 
in general, and the stuffs knitted or woven from it. Fishing with 
the line or the net is a very primitive occupation, and even 
savages know how to twist fibres and plait flexible matting from 
all kinds of nettle-plants or from the bast of certain trees. And 
why should the Fates in Homer spin specially flaxen, and not 
woollen threads, as they do later? The linen corselets mentioned 
twice in the Catalogue of Ships may have been Asiatic wares. In 
one of these passages, which has quite the appearance of being a 
late insertion, Ajax the leader of the Locrians is called lino-thorax 
(linen-corseleted) ; in the other, the same epithet is applied to the 
son of Merops, an ally of the Trojans. It is not surprising that 
the latter, a half-barbarian Asiatic, should appear in the same dress 
as the Chalybes described by Xenophon; but the adjective applied 
to the leader of the Locrians is evidently connected with the 
manner of battle peculiar to that race of Greeks j they did not 



138 FLAX. HEMP. 



fight man to man, or hurl the spear, nor did they wear iron 
helmets and shields, but used arrows and slings, shooting at the 
enemy from a distance, and they wisely wore the lighter tunic, 
quilted or woven. From that time the linen corselet is now and 
then mentioned through the whole of Greek antiquity. In the 
famous oracle, now become proverbial, which was given forth to 
the ^Egians in the middle of the seventh century B.C., the 
Argives are styled "linen-corseleted." Alcseus (600 B.C.) mentions 
breastplates of linon ; at Olympia were preserved three linen 
corselets offered by Gelon and the Syracusans after their victories 
by land and sea over the Carthaginians ; and Pausanias saw 
corselets of the same description hanging in various sanctuaries 
— for instance, in the temple of the Gryneian Apollo ; Iphicrates 
furnished the Athenian warriors with linen corselets instead of the 
former iron ones, to make them more nimble. Amidst the band 
of the ^Eginetes, Teucer the brother of Ajax wears over a sleeve- 
less, richly-pleated under-shirt a linen corselet " double-winged," 
the two ends of which fall forward over his shoulders ; Hercules, 
over an under-garment with a pleated border, has a linen corselet, 
but with only one end hanging over his left shoulder ; the Locrians 
retained this kind of garment, both in accordance with Homeric 
precedent and the ancient custom of that partly pre-Hellenic race ; 
and it was natural that Hercules the hero, armed with club and 
bow, should wear with the lion's hide the oldest war-costume, not 
the coat of mail or panoply of the Dorian chivalry. But woollen 
clothing was the rule among the Greeks, for linen was considered 
luxurious and effeminate, equally when white and lustrous, and 
when ornamented by dyeing embroidery and fringes. The Ionians 
in Asia adopted the long flowing linen garment from their Carian 
subjects and rich neighbours ; from the Ionians the custom spread 
to the kindred Athenians, who very early adopted Oriental civili- 
zation. Herodotus relates as the occasion of it, that after an 
unlucky battle with the ^Egtnetes, the only Athenian soldier that 
escaped was pricked to death by the infuriated women, to whom 
he brought the news of their husbands' loss, with the pins of their 
brooches that fastened their dresses; it was therefore decreed 
that they should lay aside the Dorian woollen robe, which was 






FLAX. 139 

merely thrown on and fastened with pins, and adopt the Ionian, 
or, as Herodotus adds, really Old-Carian linen tunic {kithon), 
which was ready sewed and shaped, and required no brooch. 
But this Ionian linen dress went out of use again at Athens, for 
Thucydides says, in a much disputed passage, that towards the 
time of the Peloponnesian war the ancient woollen garment was 
once again worn by the Athenians, and only a few of the richer 
conservative citizens refused to abandon their accustomed luxury. 
Since that time only the women wore linen textures, the finer 
kinds of which were procured from foreign countries. 

There is no certain ancient testimony as to the cultivation 
of the plant itself in Greece. In Hesiod's poems flax is never 
mentioned ; and even later it is only once named by Theophras- 
tus as requiring a fertile soil. At a very late period Pausanias 
says that the inhabitants of Elis sowed hemp, linseed, and byssus, 
according to the nature of the ground. Leake, in his " Morea," 
says that flax grows in Elis even now, but is of a coarse kind. 
It is certain that at no time did flax hold a prominent place in 
Greek agriculture as it did in many parts of Asia. 

Linen clothes and stuffs must have reached Italy at an early 
period. If Diogenes of Laerte be right, linen was not yet known 
in the cities of Magna Graecia at the time of Pythagoras, i.e., the 
latter half of the sixth century B.C., so that the philosopher, unlike 
the later Pythagoreans, was obliged to dress in pure white wool ; 
but probably what is meant is, that the Ionian linen dress was 
not in use at Croton, and Pythagoras dressed like every one else. 
The Latin word linuM does not agree in quantity with the Homeric 
linon, but it does with the usage of the Athenian Comic poets ; 
therefore, if it was a borrowed word, it had come from a district 
whose dialect was nearly related to the Attic. At an early period 
we hear of old Roman linen books, libri lintei, to whose authority 
some annalists still refer ; from the name we may suppose that 
they were written on bast) it could not be real linen, because the 
ancients did not weave long pieces of stuff intended to be cut, as 
we do, but single articles of apparel ready for immediate use. 
Prom Livy we learn that after the middle of the fifth century B.C. 
the Etruscans of Veii wore linen armour; at least their king, 



140 FLAX. HEMP. 



Tolumnius, wore a linen corselet when he rode to battle, for he 

was killed by A. Cornelius Cossus, who dedicated the thorax 

linteus of his vanquished enemy to the temple of Jupiter Feretrius 

in the Capitol. When that temple, after falling into decay, was 

restored by Augustus, he read the inscription on the thorax itself, 

so that its genuineness could not be doubted. The Faliscans, 

neighbours of the Veians, who had taken part in the same battle, 

are described by the poet Silius Italicus as wearing linen. Another 

Etruscan city, the ancient Tarquinii, not very far off, supplied 

linen for sails to the Roman fleet towards the end of the second 

Punic war, when all the allies were obliged to furnish whatever 

material their several countries produced. The whole region ot 

the Tiber, where it flowed to the sea through shrubby wildernesses, 

is described by Gratius Faliscus as growing flax. That damp 

region was not only peculiarly fitted for the plant, but was the 

scene of a very early commerce. Livy tells us that the Samnites, 

towards the end of the fourth century b.c, raised two armies, one 

having shields overlaid with gold, and one with silver, and both 

wearing plumes on their helmets; the warriors with gilt shields 

wore parti-coloured linen tunics, those with silvered shields white 

tunics, the coloured ones being probably dyed and woven in the 

distant East, for their possession of the precious metals of itself 

implies commerce with foreign countries. Still more significant 

is another event reported by Livy, which till now has scarcely 

attracted the attention of mythologists. In the year 293 B.C., 

the Samnites with great difficulty collected an army of 40,000 

men near Aquilonia. In the centre of the camp was a space two 

hundred feet every way, surrounded with trellis-work and planks, 

and roofed over with linen. There, in accordance with old 

traditions and the text of a liber Witeus, a sacrifice was offered 

up, and then the nobles of the people were led in one by one. 

The sight of the unusual form of sacrifice, the altar in the midst 

of the covered space, the newly-slaughtered animals lying around, 

and the centurions standing with drawn swords, greatly impressed 

the man who entered ; he felt more like a victim than like a 

sacrificer. He first had to swear not to reveal what he saw and 

heard, and then, in a horrible formula, invoking destruction 



FLAX. 



141 



on himself, his family, and his kindred, he made a solemn oath 
to follow his leaders to battle, never to fly from the field, and 
immediately to kill any one whom he saw attempting to do so. 
When some men, at the beginning of the ceremony, refused to 
take the oath, they were killed at the foot of the altar, and the 
sight of their corpses made those who followed more compliant. 
The nobles having thus bound themselves by oath, the general 
singled out ten men, whom he ordered to choose each a com- 
panion, and these again others, so that finally an army of 16,000 
was assembled. This legion was called the legio linteata, from 
the covering of the place where they had sworn to conquer or to 
die. They received splendid weapons and plumed helmets ; 
nevertheless they were completely destroyed by the Romans in 
one bloody battle. But why was the place covered with linen, 
and why was the legion named from that fact? Possibly under 
the operation of Pythagorean religious ideas, by which the Sam- 
nites, as other things prove, were not uninfluenced. When the 
Romans entered upon the inheritance of the Samnites and Greeks, 
linen garments, vestes lintece, were, as in the East and in Greece, 
a costly and luxurious apparel : among luxuries of the East, such 
as purple from Tyre, incense, sweet-smelling essences, fine wines, 
gems, and pearls, Cicero mentions linen dresses, much as we say 
" diamonds and lace." The boys who served at sumptuous 
banquets wore tight-fitting linen, so as to be nimbler in their 
movements. Beautiful freed-women revealed rather than hid 
their charms by gauzy textures of the isles of Cos and Amorgos ; 
rich magnates and emperors spread a linen roof over the theatre 
or forum to protect the spectators, or the judges and the judged, 
from the rays of the sun. Amid the changes of fashion, of which 
there were complaints as early as the Republican period, new 
shapes in linen dresses, kerchiefs, fillets, etc., were frequent; 
there were the supparus (originally the name of a small sail, then 
of a woman's dress, like the later camisia, shirt or chemise), and 
the sudarium, a kind of napkin or handkerchief, which — as Catullus 
says that it came from a celebrated flax region in Spain, and 
Vatinus calls it white — must have been made of linen. It was. 
afterwards called ovarium, and formed part of the dress of Chris- 



42 FLAX. HEMP. 



tian priests at mass. Linen thread was used for fishing lines, for 
tying letters, for weaving stout bathing towels and table-cloths ; 
the latter, under the name of mantelia, mantela, intended to 
preserve the costly wood from being marked by the dishes. But 
the plant itself could hardly, or only to a small extent, have been 
cultivated in that part of Italy which lay south of Rome, although 
that half of the peninsula was, in the early times of the Roman 
dominion, the civilized part, that which gave and took, the high 
road into the old world, the part to which one might say the eyes 
of the capital were turned. Cato never alludes to flax, Varro 
but slightly, and Columella names it once, together with pease, 
beans, and lentils, as a thing that might possibly find a place in 
some corner of the kitchen-garden. But a chapter on flax and 
its culture in the nineteenth book of Pliny opens to us a very 
different view, one that carries us outside of the Graeco-Roman 
world. Here we learn that though on its introduction to Europe 
the culture of flax, which had long flourished on the Nile and in 
the heart of Asia, did not take kindly to the warm mountainous 
regions of the two classic peninsulas, it soon throve luxuriantly 
in the damp, foggy plains of the barbarians, in freshly broken 
land still rich in the humus of the forest. Herodotus describes 
a maiden of the Paeonian nation in Thrace with flax on her 
spindle ; at the opposite end of Europe, Spain is celebrated both 
in early and late times for its flax production ; at the battle of 
Cannae the Iberians wore purple-bordered linen tunics; fine 
sieves of linen-thread were originally a Spanish invention; the 
Emporians manufactured linen; the fine product of Tarraco 
(called there by the Phoenician name carbasus, itself supposed 
to be the Indian word for cotton) and of Saetabis, stood in high 
repute, and is often mentioned ; and though this may not surprise 
us with regard to places on the Mediterranean coast, which were 
early open to various civilizing influences, we hear with astonish- 
ment of flax being cultivated by the rude Asturians in the distant 
city of Zcelae on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean ; and of linen, 
armour being worn by the wild robber-tribes of Lusitanians in the 
interior. But in Italy there had been, from the earliest times, a 
zone of flax-culture in all the parts accessible from the Adriatic, 






FLAX. I4 , 

both in the well-watered plains, in the tract inhabited first by 
Etruscans and then by Celts, and in the Ligurian and Venetian 
districts. Pliny mentions different kinds of North-Italian flax as 
the best in Europe after that of Spain ; namely that of Fanza in 
the Romagna (even now highly valued), that of Retovium (near 
Voghera), and that of the regio aliana between the Po and Ticino 
(the two last being on Old Ligurian ground). We have already 
seen that the Etruscans cultivated flax very early, another proof 
of the connexion of that people with the north, and of the Tiber 
being a border line where two civilizations met. As for the other 
side of the Alps, Pliny describes all the inhabitants of Gaul as 
weaving linen, up to the Celtic inhabitants of the Netherlands, 
the Morini, who were considered the outermost nation, so that 
Belgian flax and Flemish linen can date their pedigree from the 
first century a.d. There is a trace of this in the Italian word 
renso, " fine flax," from the town of Rheims whence it came. Pliny 
says, " This industry has spread even to the Germans at the other 
side of the Rhine ; the German woman knows not a dress more 
beautiful than the linen one ; they sit in subterranean chambers 
and there spin and weave." Tacitus says much the same, i.e., 
that the women dress like the men, but more frequently wrap 
themselves in linen drapery ornamented with crimson. 

While we thus find the flax industry early adopted by the 
nations of Central Europe, because it suited their soil and 
climate, by Celto-Iberians on the Bay of Biscay, by Ligurians on 
the Upper Po, and by Thracians, Celts, and Germans ; the very 
name of linen shows that they had all derived the plant from the 
classic nations, for that name extends all over the Continent, from 
the Basques at the foot of the Pyrenees, through all the Celtic 
and Germanic races to the Lithuanians, Slavs, Albanians, Magyars, 
and Finns ; and is found in languages of the most varied origin 
(note 46). 

And not only did linen become a common necessary of life and 
find several new applications among the barbarians, but those 
new uses made their way into the customs of the then declining 
ancient world. Linen as an essential part of everybody's dress 
is of northern origin. As the use of stuffed beds, bolsters, and 



M4 FLAX. HEMP. 



pillows covered with linen, was introduced into Italy from Gaul 
— for antiquity was content with mere stramenta, i.e., layers of 
carpets and soft stuffs — so the linen under-garment, the true 
shirt, with which the Greeks and Romans were unacquainted 
in its present form, was introduced by the barbarians, under the 
new Gallic name of camisia, "chemise," which occurs for the first 
time in St. Jerome. Before that time, only women of high rank 
wore linen next the skin. Pliny remarks that even in his time 
the family of the Serrani would not tolerate the shift as an article 
of female dress, doubtless from a conservative attachment to old 
customs. It was not a southern and classic, but a northern and 
barbarian taste, that made the Emperor Alexander Severus, as 
his biographer ^Elius Lampridius reports, delight in fresh white 
linen because it was not rough like wool, and scorn the luxurious 
Oriental garment, purple-striped or even embroidered with gold 
thread. A few decades later, the Emperor Aurelian presented 
the Roman populace with sleeved white tunics manufactured in 
different provinces, and also undyed linen ones from Egypt and 
Africa. We learn by an edict of 301, that the long-celebrated 
Syrian looms already furnished coarse linen for the common 
people and slaves, there being among the articles mantles of 
Gallic cut, with hoods like those now worn by monks ; binders for 
wrapping the feet in place of the modern stocking \ sheets, and 
covers for mattrasses and pillows, and various other things copied 
(we believe) from the Gauls, and which became common neces- 
saries among the lower classes only during the Imperial period. 
A century later, St. Augustine tells us in so many words that 
" outer garments are of wool, inner garments of linen," which the 
saintly Father, with the mystical wit of the Middle Ages, compares 
to the carnal and the spiritual mind. 

Neither Pliny nor Tacitus tells us whether the raw flax spun 
by the German women was imported from Gaul, like the red dye, 
or whether flax was already cultivated in the interior, or limited to 
the country on the Rhine, which had been the first to share in 
Gallic culture. The dress worn by Cimbrian prophetesses — whom 
Strabo describes as going barefoot, dressed in mantles of fine 
flax confined by iron girdles and brooches, can hardly point 



FLAX, i 4S 

to so early a cultivation of flax on the Lower Elbe; for the 
Cimbrians, if really of Germanic race, had, before their destruc- 
tion by the Romans, roamed through Celtic, and even Celto- 
Iberian lands, and had certainly become somewhat mixed with 
that race. A legendary event is reported in the pre-Italian 
history of the Longobards, which might possibly allude to a 
German cultivation of flax. The Herulians, overcome by the 
Longobards, mistook in their flight a field of blooming flax for 
a lake, threw themselves into it as if to swim, and so were 
overtaken by the enemy and destroyed. But the scene of this 
legend is the region of the Theiss in Pannonia, where flax had 
long been cultivated; and the time is late, about 500 a.d. As 
the movement of German tribes went on, linen clothing became 
more and more widely spread among them, and towards the end 
of that movement it is expressly called the national dress of the 
Germans. When the Goths, under the Emperor Valens, crossed 
the Danube, their linen dresses trimmed with tassels excited the 
greed of the Greeks. The Franks wore hose, some of leather, 
some of linen (Agathias), and the elders of the Visigoths dirty 
Unen and short fur coats (Sidon. Apollinaris). Formerly, a 
shirt of glossy linen, with red linen hose, was the costume of 
aristocratic Franks. But in the time of Charlemagne the young 
princes already preferred the short, striped Gallic sagum, while 
the emperor continued to use the old national costume. When 
the Germans — who for many centuries had been quiet inhabitants 
of the coasts, and had only dared to plunder the neighbouring 
shores of Belgium in light boats or the hollowed trunks of trees — 
suddenly began to undertake distant piratic voyages ; the result 
may be due as much to the increasing extension of flax and 
the production of sail-cloth, as to their growing acquaintance 
with iron and Roman methods of shipbuilding. At all events, in 
Caesar's time the Veneti of Brittany, who frequently crossed to 
the kindred races in Britain, used sails of skin or leather and 
iron cables; "Either," says Caesar, " because they were ignorant 
of the use of flax, or, what is more likely, because the storms are 
so violent in those regions." But of what substance were the 
Venetic sail ropes, which the Roman sailors cut in two with sharp 

10 



r 4 6 FLAX. HEMP. 



sickles fixed on long poles, so that the ships became immovable, 
and were obliged to surrender? Probably of leather thongs, for 
not only the Greeks of Homer's time, but the Illyrian Liburnians 
used such ropes. The Normans cut their cables out of the skins 
of walruses and seals; and down to modern times the fishing-nets 
in Iceland were made of strips of leather. Where hempen ropes 
have been found, there probably the sails were hempen also. In 
Pliny's time sailcloth was manufactured all over Gaul, and the 
industry had spread to the districts at the mouth of the Rhine, 
from which we may conclude that it was not known there before. 
The Suiones, ancestors of the Normans, did not (according to 
Tacitus) know the use of sails, or separate rows of oar-benches ; 
both ends of their ships were alike, so that they could land any- 
where without turning — an arrangement imitated by Germanicus 
in part of his ships when he cruised in the North Sea in 16 a.d. 
These ancient northern ships were no doubt exactly fitted for 
threading the islands, belts, and fiords of the northern coasts ; 
in the summer they probably even crossed from the Isle of Goth- 
land to the Gulfs of Finland and Riga : but it was only after the 
adoption of sails and iron from the south that the adventurous 
voyages of the Vikings commenced. 

The German word segel, sail (Anglo-Saxons^/, Old Norse segl), 
was probably of Celtic origin (Old Irish seol, soot) or came direct 
from the Latin sagulum. The Lithuanians and Poles borrowed 
the German word ; the Bohemians resorted to the phrases " piece 
of linen," and "wind-catcher;" the South Slavs said "skirt" for 
sail ; the Russians adopted the Greek fih&ros in the form fiarus 
— all quite late productions. 

Since those times flaxen textures have always been the favourite 
clothing of the German. The southern nations, who lived more 
in the open air, needed woollen clothes as a protection against 
changes of temperature ; but the Germans, especially in the 
north, who were confined to the house in winter, and had an 
inborn sense of cleanliness, preferred the smooth, light linen 
which was pleasant to the skin in their close and heated huts, 
which showed every spot of dirt, could easily be washed, and 
Secame softer and more flexible the oftener the process was 



LIN EM. 147 



repeated. Plutarch praises these qualities: "Linen," he says, 
'• makes a smooth and always clean dress, does not oppress the 
wearer by its weight, is suitable at every season, and harbours no 
vermin;" and in fact the last-named torment, from which the 
much-lauded primitive times suffered to an extent of which our 
idealists have no idea, was and is a characteristic feature of all 
fur-wearing nations. In an Old Norse legend, a merman is cap- 
tured by a king, and of all the things he sees on land, three 
please him the best : cold water for the eyes, flesh for the teeth, 
and linen for the body. This legend comes from the very 
bottom of the German heart. The demonic Frau Berchta and 
the synonymous Holla, who are represented spinning, and are 
the patrons of flax-culture, are a proof of the value laid on that 
industry and its products by national sentiment. At a time when 
paper money and saving-boxes did not exist, linen, as well as 
silver vessels, was the sign of wealth, the pride and delight of the 
mother, and the dowry of the daughters. Jean Paul says some- 
where that if the devil desired to seduce a German Hans-frau, he 
would best succeed by making her a present of a roll of fine 
linen. In Goethe's poem, Alexis exclaims : 

'* Nor such toys and trinkets only shall your lover win for you ; 
What delights the heart of housewife, that he'll fetch you too, 
Lengths of costly linen ! You shall sit and stitch and hem and fell, 
Clothing you and me, and maybe some one else as well." 

And the father in Hermann and Dorothea thus expresses 
himself : 

'* Not in vain prepares the mother, for many a year and long, 
Store of linen for the daughter, of texture fine and strong." 

For, besides other excellent qualities, linen has that of keeping 
unspoiled for years, while wool has many enemies. 

The Western Slavs were acquainted with flax and linen early in 
the Middle Ages. We are told that the Bishop of Aldenburg 
received from the whole country of the Wagrians and Obodrites 
forty bundles of flax as the tax for every plough ; so that those 
neighbours of the Germans must have cultivated flax at a time 
when the bishopric of Aldenburc was still in existence. Henry 



148 FLAX. HEMP. 



Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, in a deed dated 1158, ordains that 
de unco (for every hook = plough) toppus lini unus shall go to the 
see of Ratzeburg. At the beginning of the twelfth century the Rani 
in the Isle of Riigen had no coined money : goods were paid for 
with linen cloth. In like manner Old Norse codes value every- 
thing by yards of linen, which stood at a much higher price than 
the coarse native cloth — wadmal. Farther east, linen was for a 
long time the general medium of exchange, and even in the 
eighteenth century it was demanded as passage-toll by Caucasian 
tribes : " The Dugors," says Giildenstadt, " wanted five shirts 
or forty yards of linen for every man of my company, two 
shirts per horse, and five more per carrier in crossing : but my 
stock of linen did not go so far." With advancing agriculture, 
flax spread into the interior of the great East-European plain, 
where the fresh soil of the lake and forest regions was very 
favorable to its cultivation. Whole villages in the heart of 
Russia took to weaving linen, and adorned their towels and 
sheets with red borders, like the Germans of Tacitus. When the 
country was opened to commerce, sail-cloth became an important 
article of export, until the cotton manufacture, unnatural, dear 
and sickly, yet backed by protective duties, drew capital away 
from this ancient and national branch of industry. Flax throve 
particularly well in the damp regions bordering the Baltic, and 
for centuries the linen and tow of Riga, and the linseed shipped 
from there, were much in request. 

Leaving the history of flax among the modern European nations 
to historians of technics and political economy, we will only 
mention further the fact, that one of the most important inven- 
tions, that of making Paper out of linen rags, was rendered pos- 
sible by the general cultivation and use of flax throughout Europe. 
It could never occur to the ancients, for in their time there was 
no large accumulation of rags demanding further application. 
Perhaps, if the rags of linen clothes, sheets, tablecloths, and the 
like, had accumulated to the same extent as potsherds, which are 
said to have formed a whole hill at Rome, this new kind of libri 
lintei might have made their appearance even then ; for, in fact, 
lint made of old linen was not unknown to the Greek and 



LINEN. PAPER, 



149 



Roman surgeons. With the cultivation of cotton in Western Asia, 
the knowledge of the cotton-paper of China had also spread to 
Samarkand, and thence by means of the Arabs to Mecca, and 
from Mecca to Spain. It must have been in Spain then, that the 
use of linen instead of cotton rags was first tried ; and it is an 
interesting fact that the town Xativa, the ancient Saetabis so 
celebrated for its flax under the Romans, produced in the twelfth 
century a.d. the most excellent paper, which was exported to both 
East and West. From Spain the art gradually extended to 
France, Burgundy, Germany, and Italy. Now, as it was paper 
made of linen that first made the later invention of printing a 
fruitful one, as the general application of writing to every depart- 
ment of life, and with it the whole of modern culture, rests on the 
cheapness and excellence of that material — the historian of civili- 
zation feels so impressed with the importance of the plant that 
produces it, that he would fain, in antique fashion, bestow on it the 
epithet holy or divine, which the ancients, knowing only half its 
uses, neglected to do. And do not let us forget the art of painting 
on canvas, nor the application of linseed oil to painting, which, if 
not invented in the old home of flax, the Netherlands, was at least 
brought to perfection there, and raised into a noble branch of art 
The East in ancient times may have produced fine textures, and 
bathed them in the brilliant hues engendered in those sunny 
lands ; but they are outrivalled by our Brabant laces, our Flemish 
table-linen, our cambrics and lawns, produced amid storm and 
fog in the environs of the ocean. We also know how to wash our 
white garments with alkaline soaps ; Nausicaa and early anti- 
quity could only rinse them in running water, while the half- 
superstitious, half-practical methods of the fullers at Rome had 
only makeshifts to work with. Just as, in the Middle Ages, the 
linen sail " that toils for all " (Goethe) had banished the banks of 
oars, and set free the slaves chained to them ; so in these days 
steam is more and more superseding the sail with its many ropes, 
and lessening the number of the crew. Cotton, which the 
ancients only knew from afar, has come and set a thousand 
factories in motion, and clothed millions of men ; and its first 
serious collision with the linen fibre led to the important discovery 



150 FLAX. HEMP. 



of spinning flax by machinery. Then there came a time of dearth, 
when King Cotton seemed about to be deprived of his glory, and 
wool and flax again to take the first rank. But the crisis passed, 
and without letting cotton go, European industry draws more 
every day upon the treasures of tropical lands and distant con- 
tinents, while searching for new fibrous plants and utilizing them 
by chemical and technical science. We need only refer to jute, 
China-grass, and the New Zealand flax {JPhonnium fenax), and to 
the importance these materials have already attained. — In the 
classic countries, to come back to our point of departure, the 
cultivation of flax has remained stationary since ancient times. 
In Greece it is almost nil. The well-watered plains of Lombardy 
and Venice produce valuable sorts of summer and winter flax, 
which, by careful and peculiar processes, perhaps derived from 
antiquity, yield a very white and durable ware. Tuscany (the land 
of the old Etruscans), the Romagna, and the Marches still grow 
a good deal of flax ; but the farther south we go, the more 
sporadic becomes the cultivation, being undertaken chiefly for the 
sake of the seed and oil. Modern Italy on the whole, in spite 
of the many looms of Lombardy, does not in the production of 
linen come up to countries lying farther north : Hibernia hiding 
in her fogs ; the land of the Batavians ; Westphalia, the seat of 
the Cheruscans ; Silesia, the land of the Lygians. 

As cotton first became a world-product by being transplanted 
to America, so did flax when it reached the north of Europe, 
which formed the colonial country of this Old-Egyptian and 
Babylonian plant, as America was that of the East- Indian plant. 

The twin brother of flax, the Cannabis sativa or Hemp, belongs 
nevertheless to another family, that of the urticacece. or nettles, 
and has spread through the world in other ways and much later. 
It was unknown to the Eg)ptians — not a trace of the fibre of hemp 
has been found in the wrappings of mummies — and also to the 
Phoenicians (note 47). The Old Testament never mentions it. It 
was not generally known in Greece at the time of Herodotus, for 
that writer describes it to his readers as a strange plant. But the 
Scythians cultivated hemp, and purified and intoxicated them- 



HEMP. 



'5* 



selves by means of the seed ; it was therefore in use among the 
Medo-Persian races at the back of the Western Asiatics ; and 
originally came from Bactria and Sogdiana, the regions of the 
Aral and Caspian Seas, where it is said to grow luxuriantly in a 
wild state to this day. The use of hashish, an intoxicating drug 
made of the Cannabis indica, finds its parallel in the Scythian 
custom at the time of Herodotus. The Thracians wove dresses 
from the fibre of this plant, which did not come to them from 
Asia Minor — else the Greeks would have been acquainted with it 
also — but from their neighbours to the north-east on the Tyras 
and Borysthenes. From the Pontus and Thrace this excellent 
material for rope was exported to the Greeks, just as the Greek 
navy now obtains its hemp from Russia. Under the unchanged 
name of cannabis, cannabus, the plant migrated in comparatively 
recent times to Sicily and Italy. When Hiero of Syracuse built his 
celebrated ship, in constructing which he drew upon all countries 
for their best materials, the hemp and pitch were procured from the 
R. Rhodanus in Gaul ; so that the hemp there must have been 
uncommonly fine. Had it been transplanted there from Italy ? or 
had it travelled along the great chain of Celtic nations that already 
stretched from Gaul to Pannonia and the Haemus ? The satirist 
Lucilius, about ioo B.C., is the oldest Roman author that mentions 
hemp. Cato speaks of neither flax nor hemp. When the Spanish 
broom, spar turn or Stipa tenacissima, was introduced in the second 
Punic war, it hindered the extension of hemp, which is seldom 
mentioned, and was probably but little cultivated. Nevertheless 
it grew luxuriantly in a few fertile regions ; for instance, in the 
celebrated tract of country round Reate, in the land of the Sabines, 
where it attained the height of a tree. The Greco-Roman name 
for the plant, originally Median, but also found in the old Indian 
languages (note 48), runs unchanged through all European 
tongues, in proof of its origin, the Teutonic tongues making the 
usual change of b into/ and/: A. -Saxon hcenep, Old Norse hanpr, 
Old High German hanaf. The German names for the male and 
female plants, fimmel and maschel, are of Latin or Italic origin; 
fimmel =femella, maschel ■= masculus, but with a mistaken and 
reversed application, for fimmel is really the male plant, which, 



152 I- LAX. HEMP. 



because it is shorter and weaker, popular prejudice took to be the 
female. Hemp is now found all over Europe, and is so entirely 
indifferent to climatic influences that the East Indies and the 
Russian ports on the Baltic, nay, Archangel near the polar circle, 
share the English market between them. In modern Italy hemp 
is grown in large quantities in the districts south of the Lower Po, 
reachiDg the height of a man ; the produce is partly consumed in 
Italy for ropes and sail-cloth, and partly exported abroad. 

Cultivation for the sake of the seed is unusual in the South, but 
takes a prominent place in Russia, where, during the long and 
strict fasts, hemp-oil is commonly used for food. We will finally 
remark, that the well-known fibre sold in European markets under 
the name of Canton or Manilla hemp is no hemp at all, but is 
produced from the stalk of a tropical plant, a kind of banana ; it 
is said to be much more flexible, more elastic, and lighter in 
weight than the common hemp, having the property of floating on 
the water, and of not freezing when in a wet state during voyages 
in the northern regions. 



LEEK, ONION. 

The primitive nations of the world, besides making use of and 
cultivating nutritious plants, animals, and domestic fowls, greedily 
sought for exciting spices and condiments, among which salt held, 
and holds to this day, the foremost place. The vegetable kingdom 
furnished many sharp and pungent juices, discovered at first by 
accident, and afterwards eagerly looked for on the mountains. 
According to natural disposition and the degree of culture, their 
effect on the finer or coarser nerves of the succeeding races was 
very different. Silphium — "a plant whereof comes benzoin," 
says Pliny — and which the early Greeks thought the most delicious 
of condiments, was afterwards quite forgotten ; either because it 
was no longer forthcoming, or, as we believe, because tastes had 
changed. The laserfiitium, or master-wort, which, centuries later, 
the Romans imported from Asia and believed to be the same 
plant as the Greek silphium, was probably Ferula asafatida, or 
giant-fennel, the addition of which to his food agreeably tickled 
the cloyed palate of the aristocratic rake. So, about the onion, 
people hold very different opinions as regards it even now. The 
odour of garlic about the Oriental is quite unbearable to the 
German of Lower Saxony, and the onion-scented breath of the 
Russian is a wall of separation permitting no approach. By this 
criterion we might divide the nations into two groups : the garlic- 
lovers and the garlic-haters; which might be distinguished in 
Europe as the nations of the Mediterranean, and the nations of 
the North Sea and Baltic. 

If it be true that the plants we are now examining were indi- 
genous to the interior of Asia, where botanists say they have 
found them growing wild in the steppes; then migration and 



t54 LEEK. OX ION. 



intercourse must have extended them very early towards the 
south-west, in proof of the attraction which such strong condi- 
ments have for the natural man. In Egypt we find onions and 
garlic established articles of food from the very beginning, and the 
customs of the Egyptians were fixed and settled at an epoch when 
perhaps no Indo-Germans existed. The Israelites in the wilder- 
ness longed for the leek-plants of the Nile-valley (Numb. xi. 5) : "We 
remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely ; the cucum- 
bers, and the melons, and the leeks {khatzir\ and the onions 
(betzaltm), and the garlic (shumim)." During the building of the 
great pyramid of Cheops, says Herodotus, 1,600 talents of silver 
were spent alone in radishes, onions, and garlic for the workmen, 
as may be read on the pyramid itself in Egyptian characters. As 
the Egyptians connected even the commonest things with the 
mysteries of their religion, it was inevitable that these favourite 
plants should be reverenced as sacred, worshipped as gods, and 
therefore not touched by the pious or by priests. Pliny says that 
the Egyptians swore by the garlic and the onion. Juvenal mocks 
at this, saying that in that case the Egyptian gods grew in the 
kitchen-garden. Plutarch reports that the priests declared the 
reason why they would not eat onions or garlic was because those 
plants only grew during the waning of the moon ; but adds his 
own opinion that onions were neither good for fasters nor for 
feasters, for in the first they awakened desire,, and from the last 
they drew tears. In another passage he limits this prohibition of 
the onion to the priests of Pelusium, i.e., a locality immediately 
adjoining the leek-loving Philistines and other Semites. And this 
is confirmed by Lucian, and still more precisely by Sextus Em- 
piricus, who says it was the worship of Zeus Kasios at Pelusium 
that excluded the onion, just as that of the Libyan Aphrodite 
excluded garlic. That Philistaea produced onions is proved by 
the celebrated onion of Ascalon described by Theophrastus, after 
which is named to this day the scallion or shalot, scalogno, 
echalotte, which our people have Germanized into esch-lanch, as if 
ash-leek. The Cretan onion was similar to, or the same as that of 
Ascalon — perhaps the Philistines during their early wanderings 
and voyages had transported this onion from one coast to the 



LEEK. ONION. 



:55 



other. The Mother of the Gods, too, like Libyan Aphrodite, 
excluded garlic-eaters from her temple. For, when the witty and 
impious philosopher Stilpo, after eating his fill of garlic, lay down 
to sleep in the sanctuary of the goddess, she appeared to him in 
a dream, and asked, "Art thou a philosopher, and fearest not 
to transgress the law?" To which the sage replied, "Give me 
something else to eat, and I will abstain from garlic." The 
Israelites, ever since their regretful thoughts strayed from the 
sandy waste around them to the garlic of Egypt, have remained 
fast friends of that vegetable, both before and since the destruction 
of Jerusalem, whether at home in their Holy Land or in the 
Dispersion under Talmudic and Rabbinic rule. It is not at all 
unlikely that the much-talked-of foetor Judaicus^ which caused the 
Jews to be despised and repelled by all ancient and modern 
nations, originated in their general use of this strongly smelling 
plant. A comical anecdote told by Ammianus shows that in his 
time the Jews already stood in the same ill-repute. When Marcus 
Aurelius, victorious over the Marcomanni and Quadi, was crossing 
Palestine on his way to Egypt, the odour and tumult of the Jews 
were so disagreeable to him that he exclaimed, " O Marcomanni, 
Quadi, and Sarmatians ! I have found a people even worse than 
you ! " (When a part of the Locrians in Greece were named 
Ozolse — the stinking — the nickname was probably due, not to 
any food, but to their dress : they wore the old-fashioned goat- 
skins, which exhaled an odour like that of Russia-leather.) 
From a list of things daily provided for the head-cook of the 
Persian court, we find that there was a considerable consumption 
of garlic and onions at the Great King's table : besides cummin, 
silphium, etc., there is set down a talent's weight of garlic per 
diem, and half a talent of onions of a strong kind. The high 
antiquity of the onion is confirmed by Homer, who mentions it 
by the name of kromyon both in the Iliad and Odyssey. In the 
Iliad the onion appears as an addition to the drink offered by 
the fair-haired Hecamede to old Nestor on his returning thirsty 
from the battle ; and in the Odyssey the shining tunic of Ulysses 
is compared to the thin peel of a dry onion. As old, or perhaps 
older, than these Homeric passages is the name of a once Mega- 



156 LEEK. ON J ON, 



rian and afterwards Corinthian township Kromyon, Kretnyon, a 
name evidently derived from the onions grown there. In after 
ages, Megaris was famed (or defamed) for its cultivation and vast 
consumption of garlic ; a proverb calls crocodile's tears " Megarian 
tears," such as he sheds who looks at a cut onion. In very old 
times, when that little country was not yet Dorian or even Ionian, 
it had been conquered or overrun, first by Carians and then by 
Leleges, who perhaps introduced the Oriental kinds of allium. 

The name of the mythic founder of the town, Kromos, the 
son of Neptune, leads to the supposition of a shorter primitive 
form of the word for onion (kromydn) which may be identified 
with the name extending from Switzerland to Scandinavia, ramser, 
ramsel, rams (Allium ursimim, wild garlic), and the A. -Saxon 
hramsa ; Eng. ramsen, ramson, buckrains ; Irish creamh ; Lith. 
kermusze ; Pol. trze7nucha\ Russ. cere?nsa, etc. The Latin cepe, 
ccepa, onion, has evidently its analogue in the Arcadian kapia, garlic : 
but the supposition that the word contains the notion of head, 
ccBpa capitata, takes us to a far-distant stage of speech, when cap-ut 
and keph-ale had not yet developed their suffixes. And yet those 
suffixes date from the time when the European nations were one, 
for caput corresponds exactly to the Old Norse hbficth (for hafuth), 
and the Greek word to the A. -Saxon hafela, heafola ; but as the 
suffixes were still doubtful, the naked root itself may have held its 
ground among certain tribes, and when the garlic or onion came 
from the East, it may have been applied to those vegetables. A 
legend relating to the origin of the Italian Locrians, shows that 
among them the Greek kephale, head, could also mean an onion- 
head. When these people first landed in Italy, they swore that 
they would share the land with the original inhabitants, the Sici- 
lians, in peace and friendship, as long as they still trod the earth, 
and wore their heads on their shoulders. But they poured earth 
into their shoes, and carried heads of onions on their shoulders, 
hidden under their garments ; and, having got rid of both, they 
were released from their oath, and took sole possession of the 
country. Thence came the proverb, " The oath of the Locrians ! " 
(note 49). For a similar play on the words caput and cepa, see 
Ovid's " Fasti," 3, 339. 



LEEK. ONION. 157 



Among the different Greek names for onions, one, gethyllis, 
has a peculiar interest, because connected with a religious custom, 
and more likely to be ancient. At the festival of the Theoxenia 
at Delphi, at which all the gods were Apollo's guests, whoever 
brought the largest gethyllis (leek-onion) was entitled to a share of 
the sacrificial feast, the reason being that Leto, when pregnant, 
had craved for such an onion. 

In Greece, after the date of Homer, as well as in Italy, onions 
were the commonest and favourite food of the people. Nearly 
every scene in the comedies of Aristophanes proves this to have 
been the case at Athens ; so do many anecdotes and figures of 
speech. With increased civilization and consequent polish of 
manners, and with greater delicacy of the nerves, the former liking 
changed in the higher classes to loathing. It then meant the 
reverse of good to wish that any one " might eat onions ; " and 
the smell of garlic was proof of a person's vulgarity, or was con- 
sidered a remnant of barbarism. When Alyattes, King of Lydia, 
invited the sage Bias of Priene to visit him, the latter dismissed 
the messenger with the brief answer, " May the king eat onions ? " 
— that is, shed tears. The same story is told by Plutarch of Pit- 
tacus of Mitylene, with an addition : " May the king eat onions 
and swallow hot bread ! " The Homeric custom of seasoning 
wine with onions, more fitted for sailors than for kings, aroused 
the astonishment of later generations, who, however, supposed 
that the onion meant was the sweet onion, which is still eaten in 
the East, and has such a mild taste and smell that it can be eaten 
raw, while another kind was termed the weeping onion. In a 
Greek comedy the Athenians, " according to ancient custom," serve 
the Dioscuri with cheese, olives, and leeks at breakfast ; and Varro 
says : "The words of our forefathers, no doubt, were odorous of 
garlic, but the breath of their spirit was all the nobler." Plautus 
and Aristophanes speak of the smell of garlic as a sign of poverty,, 
and disgusting to the noble. In Horace's well-known Third 
Epode, that delicately organized poet expresses, half in joke, his 
intense dislike of garlic. " Hard is the stomach of the reapers," 
he exclaims ; " to me garlic seems a poison given me by a wicked 
witch ! In future let it be given to criminals instead of hemlock ! 



158 LEEK. ONION. 



It scorches my limbs like the sun of Apulia, like the Nessus-gar- 
ment of Hercules ! Should ever, O Maecenas, the whim take 
thee to eat of this herb, may thy mistress refuse to kiss thee, and 
fly from thy embrace to the farthest end of the couch ! " The 
last idea is often repeated by Greek and Roman poets (to-day 
one might say it of smoking or taking snuff) ; in a comedy by 
Alexis or Antiphanes, the hero, when dining with boon-com- 
panions, refuses to eat leeks, because his breath might be 
disagreeable to his lady-love. Xenophon, in his " Symposium," 
makes Charmides say in excuse of a husband who had a jealous 
wife : " Worthy sirs, Niceratus likes to come home smelling of 
onions, so that his wife may feel sure that no one has been kiss- 
ing him." In the same way Aristophanes makes an unfaithful 
wife chew garlic early in the morning, to prove her innocence to 
her husband when he returns from his post as sentry. 

On the other hand, the penetrating taste and smell of onions 
and garlic caused people to imagine that those vegetables possessed 
a magic power of breaking charms and neutralizing poison. This 
power was supposed to pertain to all strong-smelling substances, 
for instance, smoke of sulphur, which purified a hall stained with 
murder. An essay on the healing-power of onion-bulbs was 
attributed to Pythagoras. Garlic was also used in the composi- 
tion of various medicines, especially among the peasantry, says 
Pliny. It is said that Pythagoras taught people to fasten a squill 
to their thresholds to ward off evil. Just as, in the Odyssey, the 
herb moly — so-called by the gods, with a black root and milk- 
white flower, difficult for men to dig up, but easily obtained by 
the gods — makes Ulysses strong to frustrate the arts of Circe ; so 
afterwards, in many parts of Greece, various herbs which served 
as counter-charms, now one, now another, were called by the 
same name, and among them all kinds of the allium or garlic 
species. In certain districts of Arcadia, as Theophrastus tells us, 
in the important 15 th chapter of the ninth book of his " History 
of Plants," there grew a herb moly, with a round, onion-shaped 
root, and leaves like those of the squill, which served as an anti- 
dote to poison and magic, but unlike the herb described by 
JHomer, in that it was quite easy to dig up. In the north of Asia 



LEEK. ONION. 159 



Minor, and in the Pontus region, where all kinds of poisons and 
antidotes, charms and counter-charms, styptics and roots sove 
reign against a serpent's bite, were to be found, the mountain-rue 
(Ruta graveolus or montand), bore the Homeric name of moly, and 
was doubtless used in purifying corn-fields. This name had been 
brought into that region by the Greek colonists with their Homer, 
and had passed, like other Grecisms, into the Cappadocian and 
Galatian languages. For even if moly was originally a stranger, 
it seems a hundred times less probable that the presumable parent 
word should have been preserved for so many centuries among 
the immigrating Galatians and the distant Cappadocians than that 
Homer was in this, as in so many other cases, the common source. 
The Germans became acquainted with the real onion through 
the Italians, as is shown by the German names, Zwiebel and Bolle, 
both derived from the Italian cipolla. But north of the Alps, 
another remarkable word crosses Europe from east to west, 
through the languages of the three great races, Celts, Germans, 
and Slavs, with the primary meaning of " succulent herb," and 
the more definite meanings of " leek, onion, garlic " : Old Irish 
/us, Welsh llysian, Corn, les = herb, leek (s for x, as in dess = dexter, 
ses = sex, ess = ox, etc.) ; Gothic Iauk-s, Old Norse lauk-r, A. -Saxon 
ledc; and Slav, luku, Lith. liikai. That the k remains unchanged 
shows the word to be not a congener, but a borrowed word. 
Whence came it, then, and in which direction did it travel? 
Grimm derives lauk-r from lukan, to lock ; if so, it originated with 
the Germans, and was borrowed by the Slavs and Celts right and 
left ; but this looks unlikely. As the primary meaning of " herb " 
is found chiefly in Celtic tongues, while the more limited sense of 
" leek, onion," is apparently the only one in the Slavic ; and as 
the Celts were in civilization centuries ahead of their neighbours 
to the east, it seems most probable that it spread from Gaul to the 
Germans, and thence to the Slavs. The final s in the Celtic word 
might easily be taken by the Germans for a mere sign of the 
nominative, and be left out. In the time of Herodotus the Alaz- 
ones and Callipides, near Olbia on the Black Sea, cultivated leeks 
or onions ; but these half-Grecianized Scythians were not nearer 
in situation to the later Slavs than they soon became to the ap- 



160 LEEK. ONION. 



proaching Celts ; mentally they were much farther. Among the 
Thracians the onion was an old-established and indispensable 
article, if we may trust the description, by an ancient writer, of a 
Thracian marriage custom. At the nuptials of Iphicrates with the 
daughter of King Kotys, the newly- wedded pair received, among 
other more costly gifts, a bowl of snow, a cellar full of millet, 
and a pot of onions twelve cubits deep. Afterwards, when the 
Slavs took possession of Thrace, they inherited the Thracian 
millet and onion. Among Teutonic nations in the north the leek 
seems to have possessed the same magic power attributed to it in 
Asia Minor and Greece. It was thrown into the drinking cup 
to protect the drinker from treachery. In the Lay of Sigurd-rifa, 
it is said : " Bless the filling of the cup, to protect thee from 
danger ; and put leek in the drink. Then I know well that never 
for thee will the mead be mixed with perfidy." When Helgi was 
born, his father Sigmundr returned from battle wearing the noble 
leek, probably as a sign of victory : " The king himself left the 
tumult of battle to bring the noble leek to the young hero.' , The 
German knoblauch, garlic, is a corruption of kloblauch, which 
Grimm has explained as cloven-leek, from klieben, to split ; and 
the Slav, cesniiku, from cesati, to comb, shows that he is right. 
The Saxon gdrledc, Old Irish gairleog, Old Norse geir-lankr, means 
literally, spear-leek. The opposite of the gar-leek is expressed by 
the rustic Latin word unto, the single undivided onion, whence 
the French oignon, onion ; the French cive, civette, chives, is only 
the Latin ccefia. 

To this day onions and garlic are as much used and avoided in 
the south of Europe as they were in the time of Plautus and Aris- 
tophanes. Not a peasant in Italy neglects, where possible, to 
grow onions in his garden, and industriously eat them, while the 
higher classes make very scanty use of them. The Spaniards are 
still fonder of garlic than the Italians. We need scarcely remind our 
readers of the amusing scene in " Don Quixote," when that noble 
knight, seeing a peasant girl on the highroad, mistakes her for the 
beautiful Dulcinea of Toboso, but is rather puzzled by the strong 
smell of garlic which pervades the person of the supposed noble 
dame, and explains it as a trick of the magicians who have so 



LEEK. ONION. 161 



long persecuted him and now spoil the sweetest moment of his 
life. The consumption of onions at Byzantium was so enormous, 
even at the royal table, that it disgusted Liudprand, Bishop of 
Cremona, who was himself an Italian, and therefore accustomed 
to that vegetable. " The ruler of the Greeks," he says in his 
ambassadorial report of 968 a.d., " has long hair, and wears a 
train, wide sleeves, and a cap like a woman's ; ... he eats garlic, 
onions, and leeks, and swills bath-water " (that is, wine prepared 
with resin and chalk). Another time the same author writes : 
" He ordered me to come to dinner, the meats at which smelt 
strongly of garlic and onions, and were spoiled with oil and fish- 
brine." 

At that very time an Oriental, the geographer, Ibn Hauqal, 
made the same complaint of a western town, the capital of Sicily. 
In his description of Palermo, he ascribes to the inhabitants every 
kind of public vice and folly ; calls them stupid and impious, 
lukewarm to everything good, and inclined to everything bad ; 
" the habit of eating raw onions morning and evening, which dis- 
turbs their brains and blunts their intellect, is at the root of their 
sad condition. Their appearance and conduct proves this ; they 
rather drink stagnant than running water, are not afraid of stink- 
ing food, and are dirty in their persons ; in the finest houses the 
fowls run about unhindered," etc. A commentator, Yakut, ex- 
plains this passage by the testimony of a medical book, accord- 
ing to which onions so deaden the brain and the senses that he 
who has eaten of them can no longer distinguish pure water from 
stagnant. May not the old belief in the magic power of the onion 
have had an influence on this opinion, the effect being only 
reversed ? 



IT 



CUMMIN. MUSTARD. 

Two other spicy plants come also from the East — the cummin- 
plant, cuminwn, cyminum; and mustard, sinapis alba and nigra. 
The Greek name for the first plant, kyminon, is a clear proof of this. 
The Hebrew word kammon must have had a similar sound in the 
other Semitic languages ; from one of these came the Greek form, 
and passed into the Roman cwninum ; from which again all the 
present European names of the plant are derived, though we Ger- 
mans give it a new suffix in hummel, and the Poles shorten it into 
kmm, Russian tmin. The road traversed by spicy plants is there- 
fore the same as that observed in many other objects of culture, 
and is, so to speak, historically normal. Theophrastus reports 
that to make cummin thrive it was necessary to utter curses and 
blasphemies while sowing it. It might be possible to explain this 
superstition, but, as far as we can see, it would throw no new light 
on the history of the plant. Dioscorides says the Ethiopian cummin 
was the best, and that Hippocrates called it " the royal ; " but no 
such epithet is to be found applied to the plant in the works of Hip- 
pocrates that we now possess, and perhaps the naturalist's memory 
played him false. Polyamus reports that Ethiopian cummin was 
used at the Persian court. The next best kind was the Egyptian, 
which, according to Dioscorides, also grew in Galatia and Cilicia 
in Asia Minor, and (by transplantation) in Tarentum j in fact, 
modern Greece still imports cummin from the harbours of the 
Levant, especially from Smyrna, and it is largely cultivated in 
Apulia in Italy. Among the Romans, says Pliny, the cummin of 
Carpetania, in the heart of Spain, was most valued, and after it that 
of Ethiopia, Africa, or even Egypt. Throughout antiquity cummin 
was valued as a mildly exciting and agreeable spice. A writer of 



CUMMIN. MUSTARD. 163 

comedies mentions herbs, cummin, salt, water, and oil as the principal 
requisites in cooking fish ; and Pliny says that cummin agreeably 
excites a flagging appetite. As salt was a symbol of friendship, 
u sharers of salt and cummin " meant intimate friends. It was an 
aspiring herb, in sublime tendens, and possessed the power of blanch- 
ing a too-blooming cheek. Such seeds as the Roman cummin, the 
black cummin, nigella saliva, the coriander, and others, naturally 
played a less important part after pepper was discovered. Of 
these we single out the black cummin, because among the Romans 
it went by the Eastern name of git, gith, and thus bears on its face 
the impress of its origin. It is mentioned first by Plautus ; later, 
by Columella and Pliny, as something quite common. In Greece 
it had quite a different name, and therefore cannot have reached 
Italy from that country. Therefore it could only have been intro- 
duced at such an early period by the Carthaginians from Africa. 
Now the Africans called the coriander goid (Diosc. iii. 64), which, 
pronounced as in modern Greek, would be gidh, the same name 
that the Roman applied to nigella saliva; and we may add that 
gad is the Hebrew for coriander. It is indifferent whether this 
gad was originally Semitic or borrowed ; even the distinctness of 
the two plants presents no difficulty, considering the inexactness 
and fickleness of the popular speech of commerce. The cummin 
really indigenous to Central Europe, carum carvi, is largely used 
to this day; both on bread, and in cheese, cabbage, etc., but 
above all as " double-cummin " in brandy, it is much (often too 
much) relished by the Hyperboreans. 

Mustard is equally mentioned by the Attic comic dramatists 
as a well-known biting substance, exciting tears and grimaces, but 
excellently calculated to give a relish to insipid meats. The Athe- 
nians called it napy ; while the Hellenistic name was sindpi, or 
sinapy, whence the Latin sinapi, or sinapis. The first form — which 
is also seen in the extension, napeion — is remarkably like the Latin 
napits (navew, turnip), to which the mustard-plant bears some re- 
semblance, and the name of the one may have been given to the 
other. The elder Greek writers all use napy for mustard ; it is only 
in the Macedonian time, and with the Alexandrian poet Nicander, 
asw sindpi became common, and then the older name went uot 



164 CUMMIN. MUSTARD. 

of use. In Italy the word sinapis, or sinapi, was exclusively 
used ; while napus meant only the turnip. It seems improbable 
that this similarity of sound can be accidental, but there is nothing 
to show in what relation the two forms stood to each other. The 
double form might have its foundation in the laws of the language 
from which the word was derived ; but what language was that ? 
At Athens the mustard of Cyprus was considered the best. 
Benfey conjectures that the word was originally Sanskrit, but 
altered first by the Persians, and then by the Greeks into sinapi. 
The analogy of some Egyptian words of double form {silt or 
seselis, sari or sisaron, etc.) would rather lead us to guess an 
Egyptian origin for napy and sinapi. The Italian mostarda, 
French moutarde, etc., came from mustum, the must with which 
the mustard was mixed ; but the German word sen/, like the 
German names for vinegar, onion, cummin, oil, salad, lettuce, 
endive, chicory, cress, celery, parsley, fennel, anise, and many 
others, came from Italy. 



LENTILS AND PEAS, 

The first cultivation of the pulses was very near in point of time 
to that of the flour-yielding grasses. The pulses were almost 
equal to the latter in value, either as affording nourishment for 
men and animals, or seed for fallow ground ; and, like them, the 
more valuable because the seeds can be kept a long time and 
carried far. We have already, in passing (note 17), spoken of the 
Bean as a very ancient article of food ; and Lentils and Peas, in 
the countries where they grew wild, must have been very early 
noticed by the shepherds on account of their edible seeds. From 
that point to the artificial extension of the plants was but a step. 
But where did they grow wild? As naturalists hitherto have 
failed to tell us anything certain about the original home and first 
cultivation of these plants, we are again obliged to have recourse 
to the ancient testimony preserved in language, and handed down 
till the dawn of history. But in the present case we find, even 
there, very indecisive answers to our questions ; for, first, the names 
of the plants under examination are of such a general character 
that they may be very old, while the seed or grain of which they 
speak may be very young; secondly, while we rejoice to find a 
corresponding individual nomenclature among different nations, 
a doubt arises whether the agriculture of a much later age may 
not have carried the word abroad ; and, thirdly, in the latter case, 
which would still be instructive, it is often doubtful whether the 
transmission was in this or in that direction — for instance, from 
north to south, or the contrary. The only thing we can clearly 
perceive is that the Lentil was a product of pre-Indo-Germanic 
culture, and came to the European nations from the south-east ; 
while the Pea — we mean all the species of that plant — belongs to 



1 66 LENTILS AND PEAS. 



Central Asia, and thence found its way past the Pontus into 
Europe. 

The fact that the lentil grew in Egypt — particularly in the half- 
Semitic borderland of Pelusium and elsewhere in the Delta of the 
Nile, where stood Phacussa, or Phacussse, the lentil-town — is 
sufficiently proved. The tiny fragments of hewn stone which 
Strabo saw lying in heaps at the foot of the pyramids in the shape 
of lentils, were said by the people to be the petrified remains of 
the meals eaten by the builders — which at least proves that those 
most ancient of masons were thought of as lentil-eaters. Biblical 
history shows us that the Israelites were fond of lentils, for a dish 
of which the eldest son of the patriarch sold his birthright. 
David, when in the desert, is provided by his friends with lentils 
among other things; (2 Sam. xvii. 28) they "brought beds and 
basins, and earthenware vessels, and wheat, and barley, and flour, 
and parched corn, and beans, and lentils, and parched pulse." 
The old Hebrew name for lentils, adas/iim, is still used by the 
Arabs, and has been adopted by the Persians. The Greeks, those 
pupils of the Semites, must have soon become acquainted with 
the fruit. It is true that Homer never mentions it ; but eating 
lentils was a custom of the common people at Athens in the 
middle of the fifth century B.C., and Aristophanes could write, 
"Now that he is rich he will no longer eat lentils; formerly, when 
he was poor, he ate what he could get." " No lentils, pray ! " 
cries one of Pherecrates' dramatic personages, "for the breath of 
one who eats lentils smells ! " The Greeks called the lentil-bean 
and the dish made of it phake, and the plant and its seed phakos, 
an obscure word that has no analogy with any other, and never 
reached Italy. The Romans, who served lentils and salt at 
funeral banquets, called the former lens, lentis, a word not derived 
from any Greek source. Nor can we guess whence it came ; even 
the Latin gives no hint. In the usual way the lentil migrated 
from Italy across the Alps to Germany, and to the Lithuanians 
and Slavs. The German linsi, li/ise, the Lithuanian lenszis, the 
Slavic lesta, etc., are simply the Latin lens, lentis, modified to suit 
the barbarian tongue. The Slavs have also another expression, 
socivo, Russian cecevica, Polish soczevica, etc. ; with these compare 



LENTILS AND PEAS. 107 

the Old Prussian licutkekers (lentils), and keekers (peas). Like the 
last, the assibilated Slavic forms are only an echo of the Latin 
cicer, German kicher, Italian cece, and French chiehe. 

Among the different names for the Pea and its varieties the 
most interesting, because one of the oldest, and still existing, is 
the Greek erebinthos. It occurs in Homer side by side with the 
bean. Helenus, the son of Priam, has shot an arrow at Menelaus, 
which rebounds from his armour "as on some wide threshing- 
floor the dark beans and erebinths leap from the winnower's fan 
in a whistling wind." The passage does not inform us what kind 
of pea is meant, whether the chick-pea, the flat, the common, or 
what. Theophrastus, many centuries after, uses erebinthos in the 
sense of chick-pea, for he speaks of its pod as being round. 
Stript of the suffix inth, it seems the same as the other word for 
pea, orobos ; and the oldest form of the word seems to have been 
vorvos, and to have come from Asia Minor. To Asia Minor it 
could not have come from the tropical palm-lands towards India, 
nor from Syria or Egypt, for none of these had the pea ; it must 
therefore have come from the region of the Pontus and Caucasus. 
When the Greeks brought the culture of the pea into Italy, the 
Latins called it ervum, from which was derived the Anglo-Saxon 
earfe; but, curiously, the other Teutonic tongues show the word 
in an elongated form — Low German, ervet ; High German, arawzz, 
now erbse. Did they develop this prolongation independently ? 
If we look at the matter more closely, we may find that not the 
Latin ervum, but the fuller Greek form exeb-inth, was the real 
source of araw-lz, and the rest ; and that the time when peas be- 
came known to the Germans was that during which the Goths and 
other German nations came into direct contact with the Greek 
language, or with nations of half-Grecian culture on the lower 
Danube. 

Besides orobos and erebinthos, the Greeks had another very 
old name for the common pea, pisos, pison, which all etymologists 
connect with the root to which belongs the Latin pinsere, pisere, 
to pound, to stamp; but this gives us no hint as to the antiquity 
of the fruit. By this name the pea is not described as something 
fit to pound or grind, but as the sort of grains or crumbs produced 



1 68 LENTILS AND PEAS. 

by bruising or crushing, and may have been first applied to gravel, 
shingle, hail, etc. — Lithuanian/M<z (sand), Old Slavic pesuku (sand, 
pebble), Russian pesbk, Polish piasek, and so on. So a long exist- 
ing word was applied to the pea, and has stuck to it. The example 
of the Greeks was followed by the Latins with their pisum ; it held 
its ground in the Romance languages, and even passed to the 
Celts and the English (who, mistaking their peas for a plural, have 
dropt the s), but not to the Germans ; perhaps an additional hint 
that the latter had formed their own ervet much earlier, before 
the beginning of mediaeval influences from the south and west. 

Like onions and lentils at Athens, onions and chick-peas formed 
the frugal meal of the poorer classes in Italy ; so that during the 
festival of the Floralia, beans and chick-peas were scattered 
among the people, who laughingly picked them up. Every one 
knows that Lentulus, Fabius, and Piso were named after the cor- 
responding seeds, as well as Cicero from the chick-pea or deer. 
We mention this to show that such popular nick-names could 
only be taken from things long known among the people. Many 
names both old and new show that the different nations applied 
the meaning of pebbles or hailstones to peas, either from an innate 
similarity of fancy, or following the example of the people by 
whom the plant was first introduced. 

As the Vetch was only cultivated in the later times, as green 
fodder, and food for pigeons, fowls, etc., the transition from the 
Greek bikos, bikion, to the Latin vicia, and from that to the 
German wicke, etc., is quite normal. 



LAUREL. MYRTLE. 

(laurus nobilis.) (myrtus communis.) 

At a very early period were introduced the myrtle and the laurel — 
the first dedicated to Aphrodite, the second to Apollo — and are 
often mentioned together, not only in Mignon's Song, but by 
Virgil, Horace, etc. Both plants accompanied the migrations of 
various religions from place to place in Greece, and both were 
planted around their respective sanctuaries. The Myrtle, called 
so from its balsamic odour, came from the very region in which 
the Oriental Goddess of Nature, Aphrodite, had her origin. In 
the city of Temnos in Lydia, on the left bank of the R. Hermos, a 
figure of Aphrodite carved from living myrtle had been already 
made by Pelops, the son of Tantalus, to obtain the favour of the 
goddess in his wooing of Hippodamia. In Cyprus, the seat of 
the goddess Astarte, Myrrha, the daughter of the priest-king 
Cinyras, was changed into a myrtle to protect her from the 
persecution of her incestuous father ; and from that tree, in due 
time, Adonis was born. The same legend is related by Panyasis, 
with the difference that he calls the father Theias, an Assyrian 
(that is, Syrian) king, and that the daughter is changed into a 
myrrh-tree, smyrna, the Arabian myrtle. At the festival of the 
Hellotia, held at Crete and Corinth in honour of the Moon-goddess 
Europa, an enormous wreath of myrtle was carried about, called 
Hellotis after one of the names of the goddess herself. Both 
Crete and Corinth were ancient seats of Semitic worship. The 
names of the Amazons who were priestesses of the Moon-goddess 
in Asia Minor — i.e., Myrina, whose tomb is mentioned in the Iliad, 
and Smyrna, after whom the town of that name was called — point 



170 LAUREL. MYRTLE. 



to the use of incense, anointing and crowning with myrrh and 
myrtle, connected with the worship of the goddess. When the 
three ancient towns opposite the Isle of Cythera — Side, called 
after the daughter of Danaus ; Etis and Aphrodisias, both founded 
by ^Eneas, son of Aphrodite — united in founding a new city, Boiai 
(Bceae), they were shown the proper place by a hare, which hid 
itself in a myrtle-bush ; the myrtle was used to make an idol, 
which still existed at the time of Pausanias under the name of 
Artemis Soteira. Polycharmus of Naucratis, in his work on 
Aphrodite, relates that, in the twenty-third Olympiad, Herostratus 
purchased a small figure of Aphrodite at Paphos in Cyprus, and 
then set sail for Naucratis. Not far from the Egyptian coast he 
was overtaken by a storm, during which the crew prayed to the 
figure of Aphrodite for help. Suddenly the ship was covered 
with green myrtle-branches and filled with a sweet scent, the sun 
shone again, and the voyagers ran safely into their wished-for 
haven. Herostratus placed the figure and the myrtle-branches 
in the temple of Aphrodite, and gave a banquet in the sanctuary 
itself, at which the guests wore wreaths of myrtles. Such wreaths 
were afterwards called Naucratic. As this event happened before 
the founding of the Greek Naucratis, the emporium of the Delta, 
there must have been an older seaport there at which Aphrodite 
was worshipped; and indeed the coast of Lower Egypt was 
connected from the earliest times with Syria, Phoenicia, and 
Cyprus, interchanging with those lands not only merchandise, but 
religious customs and ideas. 

The barbaric conception of Aphrodite as a power of nature to 
be worshipped with licentious rites was gradually transformed, 
among the Greeks, into a personification of feminine beauty and 
of love ; and the myrtle, beloved on account of its sweet scent, 
evergreen leaves, white blossoms, and aromatic berries, was every- 
where to be seen near temples, in gardens, and soon even growing 
freely on the rocky coasts of Greece, and was abundantly used 
for wreaths and decorations, even in rites with which the goddess 
was not directly concerned. Only from the worship of the austere 
goddess Hera, and of Artemis, was the myrtle banished ; and in 
the rare cases where we do find the bridal plant connected with 



LA UREL. M YR TLE. 1 7 1 

chaste Artemis, it is probable that the transformation of the armed 
Ashera of Ascalon, the goddess of Cythera, into a Grecian form 
had only taken another direction. 

The Laurel, too, on account of its pungent aromatic scent and 
taste, and its evergreen leaves and berries, was very early con- 
sidered a sacred tree. The strong scent exhaled by its boughs 
dispelled mould and decay ; and that god who, from a personi- 
fication of the plague-producing and also plague-dispelling rays 
of the sun, had gradually changed into the earnest god of expia- 
tion for moral sickness and pollution — he, Apollo, son of Leto, 
Apollo Katharsios (the cleanser), chose this tree as the symbol 
and magical means of the purification accomplished by his power. 

The laurel is mentioned in the legend of Orestes, the matricide 
who was pursued by the Furies, and afterward healed from guilt 
and madness by Apollo. At Trcezen no citizen would receive the 
murderer into his house, so Orestes was cleansed from blood- 
guiltiness in a separate building named the Tent of Orestes ; and 
when the katharsia had been buried in the ground, there sprang 
out of them a laurel-tree that still stood before the Tent in the 
time of Pausanias. Apollo himself, after killing the Python, had 
need of expiation for the blood shed : at the command of Jupiter, 
he hurried to a Thessalian temple in the vale of Tempe, crowned 
himself with a laurel branch from the tree standing near the altar, 
took another branch in his hand, and walked along the Pythian 
highway into Delphi as the prince of oracles. This mythic event 
was repeated every eight years by the people of Delphi in a 
peculiar religious representation. A noble Delphian youth 
marched with the band of Daphnephori (laurel-bearers) to the altar 
in the vale of Tempe, broke the bough of expiation from the tree, 
and, following the sacred route from one shrine of Apollo to the 
other pointed out by the legend, returned to the temple at Delphi. 
As the sanctuaries of Apollo became more numerous, Greece 
became more thickly covered with groves of laurel. The tree 
having been dedicated to the god, it shared in all his sacred 
preferences and performances. A laurel staff, aisakos, imparted 
the power of divination to seers and prophets; the oracles of 
Apollo were given forth from a laurel; and in the most holy place, 



172 LAUREL. MYRTLE. 

laurel branches twined round and upon the tripod from which 
the Pythia prophesied. Manto, the daughter of the seer Tiresias, 
is also called Daphne, or the laurel ; when the Epigoni took 
Thebes, they dedicated this Daphne to the temple at Delphi, and 
from that time she prophesied in that city. Homer borrowed 
many of her sayings and introduced them into his epics. And as 
poets are also prophets, and Apollo, prince of the Muses, fills 
them, a branch and crown of laurel became also the badge of the 
minstrel, the magic means of poetic inspiration. Thus Hesiod 
boasts that the Muses put a laurel branch from Helicon into his 
hand, that he might reveal what was hidden, and prophesy the 
future with the voice of a god. Laurel branches were carried in 
all processions, sacrifices, games and charms connected with the 
worship of Apollo. If the tree flourished in an unusual manner 
in any particular spot, that spot was soon singled out by legend 
as the birthplace of Daphne. Thus the Arcadians related that 
Daphne was the daughter of their river Ladon and the Earth, and 
was changed into a laurel-tree; but according to Python the laurel 
was brought from Thessaly; the victor's crown in the Pythian 
games was at first fetched from Tempe, or consisted of oak leaves, 
there being as yet no laurels in that place. This would seem to 
prove that the laurel was a Thessalian plant, and at present it 
cannot be traced further. 

Turning to Italy, we find that originally both Aphrodite and 
Apollo were strangers to that country. Both these deities were 
introduced by the Greek colonists, who also brought the myrtle 
and the laurel into the western peninsula. The representations by 
the Campanian Greeks of ^Eneas's wanderings and his settlement 
in Italy, the fame and influence of the temple of Venus Urania at 
Eryx in Sicily, founded by the Phoenicians and adopted by the 
Greeks, and the new institutions proceeding thence, could not fail 
to spread the goddess's favourite tree throughout the west. In 
that part of the world the myrtle is said to have first appeared in 
the Isle of Circe — the promontory south of the Pontine marshes — 
on the grave of Elpenor, Ulysses' youthful companion, who fell 
from the roof drunk with wine and sleep. Apollo was also the 
object of ardent veneration in the cities of Magna Graecia, and 



LAUREL. MYRTLE. i73 

the founders of temples did not neglect to plant his favourite 
tree. Italian legend made Rhegium the scene of Orestes being 
cleansed from blood-guiltiness (as Greek legends made Athens 
and Troezen) ; there he founded a temple of Apollo, from the 
sacred groves of which the Rhegians used to take laurel boughs 
with them on their pilgrimages to Delphi. The coins of the 
Brettians, of Nola, etc., are stamped with a head of Apollo 
crowned with laurel. A temple of Apollo stood in the Acropolis of 
Cumse, the home of the Sibyl. Thence Grecian civilization poured, 
not in a slender brook, but in a full stream, as Cicero says, over the 
barbarians, inculcating the worship of the purest of Grecian gods 
and his attributes. The laurel soon found a place in the numerous 
purifying and atoning rites of the Latin-Sabine religion ; in the ser- 
vice of the Lares ; at celebrations of the Palilia (in honour of the 
goddess Pales, who was sacrificed to with cakes and milk), and the 
Poplifngia (anniversary of the flight of the Romans from the 
Etruscans) ; and at triumphal processions of victorious armies 
and generals — for the laurel cleansed men from the blood shed in 
battle, its name being derived from that quality (note 50), while 
the myrtle, the emblem of reconciliation, adorned him who ended 
a campaign without striking a blow. Thus about 300 b.c. Theo- 
phrastus could say that the plain of Latium was full of laurel and 
myrtle trees, and the hills were clothed with firs and pines. A century 
and a half later we find three kinds of laurel mentioned by Cato 
— the laurus Cypria, Delphica, and silvatica, of which names the 
first two explain themselves, but the last probably meant the 
Viburnum Tinus, just as the wild myrtle mentioned by Dioscorides 
is nothing but the butcher's-broom or ruscus aculeatus. The analogy 
of Corsica, in which within historic times the primitive wilderness 
still existed, and no kind of laurel grew, proves that the laurel 
was once not indigenous to Italy, for a continent always sees its 
own former state mirrored in the neighbouring islands. In Italy 
the laurel has always been a tree of the temple and garden, and 
the northern pilgrim who dreams of Hesperian laurel-woods, will 
be greatly disappointed. In Greece, too, the laurus nobilis in a 
wild state is generally but a large shrub ; though under favourable 
circumstances it will grow to a stately tree. Herr Fraas found it 



174 LAUREL. MYRTLE. 

rare in Southern Greece, and in the form of groves only in the 
north, especially in Phthiotic Thessaly, " that is, in the neighbour- 
hood of monasteries, which make a point of cultivating them" 
In Hesiod's time the tree cannot have been uncommon on Mount 
Helicon in Bceotia, for that poet advises people to make their 
plough-shafts of laurel or elm wood, neither being liable to become 
worm-eaten. The cave of the Cyclop in the Odyssey is hidden by 
laurels : 

" When to the utmost verge of land we drew, 
Fast by the sea a lonely cave we view, 
High, and with darkening laurels covered o'er." 

The tree, as we suppose, was brought to Europe from Asia 
Minor, probably in connexion with a purifying religious rite, 
whether of migrating Thracians or Carians or Cretans, etc. 
Legend says that the seer Branchus, the mythic founder of the 
Branchid-oracle near Miletus (which the first Ionian settlers 
found already established among the Carians), sprinkled and 
purified the Milesians with laurel-branches during a plague. 

The mention of the laurel in the legend of the Argonauts brings 
us to the Thracian Bosphorus. There, in prehistoric times, dwelt 
the mythic Bebrycians, whose king, Amykos, son of Poseidon, 
was slain in a boxing-match with Polydeukes, as Apollonius 
Rhodius circumstantially relates at the beginning of the second 
book of the Argonautica. The victor and his followers crowned 
themselves with laurel from a tree growing on the shore, to which 
they had fastened their ship, and sang their hymn accompanied 
by Orpheus's lyre. Two ancient authors mention the tree, one 
saying that a tall laurel-tree really grew near a place still inhabited 
and called Amykos, and the other that there was a temple of 
Amykos with a laurel-tree, and that he who broke a branch of it 
immediately began to curse. Pliny says that a laurel grew on the 
grave of Amykos, and was called the " unreasonable," because if a 
branch of it were brought on board a ship there immediately 
ensued a quarrel until it was thrown away. Here, too, the laurel 
is the symbol of expiation for bloodshed, but the idea that it led 
to strife and was called insana is owing to its having grown 
on the grave or near the temple of the bragging, quarrelsome 



LAUREL. MYRTLE. 175 

giant. Attempts had been made, as Theophrastus relates, to 
plant myrtles and laurels farther north, near Panticapaeum (Kertch 
in the Crimea), with a view to religious ceremonies ; but they did 
not succeed, evidently owing to the rigour of the Scythian winter. 
Pliny repeats this story, but curiously connects it with King 
Mithridates. If Pliny was not mistaken in dragging in Mithri- 
dates (note 51), if the planting of those trees really had to do 
with the religion of the Pontic king, who was of Persian race ; we 
already know from Herodotus and Strabo that the Persians made 
use of the laurel and myrtle in certain sacred ceremonies, and 
must therefore have possessed those trees. Both the coast-loving 
myrtle {amantes litora myrtos) and the laurel are products of a mild 
climate free from extremes. The myrtle is in this respect more 
delicate than the laurel. The first, if we are not mistaken, spread 
from the south-east along the rocky coasts of the Mediterranean. 
The second — flourishing not only in Cilicia, where it ascends almost 
to the celebrated Cilician Gates, and in Lycia, and up the coast 
of Asia Minor as far as Troas, but also on the southern shores of 
the Propontis and Euxine right away to Georgia, where it ceases — 
was first introduced into the northern part of the Greek peninsula, 
and then spread to the south and west ; though it never throve so 
well in a free condition in Europe as it does in Western Asia, 
either as regards the number of trees or their beauty. 



THE BOX-TREE. 

Botanists will unhesitatingly affirm that the evergreen box-tree, 
the diminutive image of the myrtle, belongs by nature to the 
flora of Southern Europe ; but the historian is not so sure of that. 
At the first glance we are struck by the fact that its Latin name 
buxus (or in the older and popular form buxum) is borrowed from 
the Greek pyxos — for no one will maintain that the two are simply 
congeners ; and we are surprised that a shrub or tree indigenous 
to Italy should bear a foreign name. From the earliest times the 
wood of the box-tree was highly valued for its hard close grain, 
its weight, its resistance to decay, and its faultless smoothness 
when polished. It was the ebony of the north and west ; it was 
used for tools of all kinds, for guitars and flutes, for jewel-boxes, 
tables, doorposts, images of gods ; and to this day it is indispens- 
able to the art of wood-engraving : reasons sufficient for a diligent 
propagation of the little tree, which, moreover, as Theophrastus says, 
is " one of the good growers ; " and which therefore, having been 
introduced by man into various countries in an obscure period of 
which we have no record, was easily mistaken in historic times for 
a native of those countries. Now if Asia was its native home, 
from what part of that continent did it commence its migrations ? 
In that wonderful section of Theophrastus' history of plants, in 
which he sketches a picture of the geography of plants, extending 
far beyond the immense empire of Alexander the Great — I mean 
the first few chapters of the fourth book — the author reckons the 
box among the plants of cold climates; and in the preceding 
chapter he says that the box and the lime were difficult to rear 
in the gardens of Babylon on account of the too great mild- 
ness of the climate. He says the same thing of the box and 



THE BOX-TREE. 



i 77 



the lime in countries where the date-palm flourishes. From 
this it would appear that the box-tree was not indigenous to 
the Semitic regions, and therefore the tree mentioned in the 
Old Testament could not be the box, though translated so 
in Isaiah and Ezekiel : "I will set in the desert the fir-tree 
and the pine, and the box-tree together ; " and : " The glory 
of Lebanon shall come unto thee, the fir-tree, the pine-tree, 
and the box together." But on the mountains of Pontic Asia 
Minor the tree flourished exceedingly, and attained a height and 
thickness found nowhere in Greece. The Cytorus mountains 
near Amastris in Paphlagonia, which approach very near the 
Black Sea, were celebrated for their box-tree forests ; and as men 
spoke of " carrying owls to Athens," or " fish to the Hellespont," 
(that is, coals to Newcastle), there was also a proverb that ran, 
" Thou hast brought box-trees to the Cytorus." To these Pliny 
adds the mountains of Berecyntus in Phrygia. Now the Paphla- 
gonians being, as we learn from Homer, allies of the Trojans, and 
mules having originated among the Henetians there, we have an 
explanation of the box-wood yoke of Priam's mule-drawn chariot : 

" Box was the yoke, embossed with costly pains." — Iliad. 

In the Middle Ages, Marco Polo writes, "In the province of 
Georgia all the woods consist of box-trees ; " and his latest editor 
adds, " The wood of the box-tree was so plentiful in the Abkhasian 
forests, and formed such an important article of Genoese com- 
merce, that the Bay of Bambor, north-west of Suchum Kaleh, 
through which that commerce passed, received the name of Chao 
de Bux, or, as we might say Box Bay." 

The box-tree already grew on the Macedonian Olympus at the 
date of Theophrastus, but it was of a low, degenerate, knotty, and 
therefore useless kind. In the more southern parts of Greece, in 
what is now the modern kingdom, the buxus sempervirens is not 
common; but it was reported to Theophrastus of the western parts, 
and especially of the Isle of Kyrnos (Corsica), that the finest, 
tallest, and thickest of all box-trees grew there, and that in con- 
sequence the honey obtained in that region had a disagreeable 
smell. Although the Greeks very early colonized part of the coasts 

12 



178 THE BOX-TREE. 



of Italy, Gaul, and Spain, they remained almost ignorant of the 
interior of those countries until a very late period. Even in 
Theophrastus' day there hangs over those lands a veil, through 
which the Greek writers only catch momentary glimpses. Corsica 
in particular was then a half-mythic land ; and according to the 
primitive notion of an identity between the extreme west and ex- 
treme east, it would be quite according to rule that any products 
of Pontus — in this case the valuable box-tree — should be trans- 
ferred to that island. For the honey of Pontus also derived its 
disagreeable smell from the box-tree ; and so late an author as 
Diodorus (or rather the Sicilian historian Timseus, whom he 
quotes) speaks of Corsica as a kind of fairyland, a land inhabited 
by men virtuous and upright, and of simple pastoral habits. Now 
whether fancy in the same way created the box-trees that grew in 
the thick and awful forests of the island, or whether the kind 
called buxus balearica, now peculiar to the Balearic Isles, was 
formerly found in Corsica — in any case, the connexion between 
the box-tree and bitter honey in that island is a fable. But the 
name of the town Pyxous, Latin Buxentum^ proves at least that 
the box-tree grew on the Italian coast, near the modern town of 
Policastro in Calabria, in the fifth century B.C., three or four 
centuries after the first arrival of the Greeks in those parts ; for 
that ancient town, founded in 467 b.c. by Mikythos, tyrant of 
Messina, was undoubtedly named after the box-trees found in the 
neighbourhood. 

Among the later Romans the living shrub served, as now with 
us, for the borders of garden -paths and beds, and was dipt 
into various forms of animals or even letters. Very instructive 
in this connexion is the younger Pliny's description of his villa at 
Tusculum. A plant so generally useful, a species of wood so 
valuable, must surely, if slowly, have been propagated in suitable 
localities. During the eighteen centuries since the time of Pliny, 
who mentions three kinds of box-tree, the plant has been fully 
acclimatized on the coasts of France, England, and even Ireland ; 
and as it was certainly human traffic that brought it to these places, 
it is not unreasonable to suppose that in ancient times migrations 
from Cappadocia were the occasion of the tree being brought to 






THE BOX-TREE. 179 



the Mediterranean countries. It is not surprising that the name 
of the tree in all European languages is derived from the Latin ; 
it is a more interesting fact that, since the Middle Ages, all objects 
that were originally made of box -wood took their names from 
the tree. Thus in German, biichse, in all its meanings, even that 
of a fire-arm ; French, bozfe, and the verb bolter^ to limp, that is, 
to put or get out of the boite (socket of a joint) ; boisseau, a 
bushel; boussole, the compass, Span, bruxula ; buisson, a bush, 
Ital. bus done ; buste, Ital. busto, a bust; Slav, pushika, pushka, a 
cannon ; pushkari, cannoneer ; Magyar puska, and many others 
(note 52). 



THE POMEGRANATE-TREE. 

(PUNICA GRANATUM.) 

Religious intercourse first brought the beautiful pomegranate- 
tree to Europe in ancient times. Its scarlet blossoms, its glitter- 
ing foliage, its rosy-cheeked and kernelled fruit, must from the 
first have strongly excited the mystically disposed imagination of 
the nations of Western Asia. Two passages already quoted from 
the Odyssey mention pomegranates, roiai (rcese), which name 
alone would prove that the plant was derived from the Semitic 
sphere of languages and cultivation (note 53). The tree held so 
prominent a place in Syro-Phcenician worship, that the name of 
its fruit, Rimmon, is the same as that of the Sun-god, Hadad- 
Rimmon. According to the legend, Aphrodite herself had 
planted the tree in Cyprus ; it was dedicated to Adonis, and is 
intimately mixed up with the divine myth of the Phrygians. No 
doubt the " apple " that Trojan Paris adjudged to the national 
goddess Aphrodite, in her struggle with the intruding worships of 
Athena and Hera, was first imagined as a pomegranate. The 
tree and the fruit have another name in Greek, side, which 
probably came from Asia Minor, and was a Carian or Phrygian 
word. In literature the word appears first in a verse of Empe- 
docles (middle of the fifth century B.C.) quoted by Plutarch. The 
writings of Hippocrates contain mention of the localities and 
dialects in which the word was common. The Boeotians called 
the fruit side, the Athenians roa. Athenseus relates, that when the 
Boeotians and Athenians quarrelled about a piece of borderland 
called Sidce, Epaminondas suddenly held up a pomegranate and 
asked, " What do you call that ? " When the Athenians answered 



POMEGRANATE. 181 



" roa," Epaminondas cried, " But we call it side" and he won his 
cause. And in much older times there were places, both in 
Greece and Asia Minor, whose names were derived from the word 
side. On the coast of Laconia was a town Side, named after a 
daughter of Danaus, and politically connected with the two places 
Etis and Aphrodisias mentioned before under the article " Myrtle;" 
in Troas itself Strabo names a city Sidene on the Granicus; 
Stephen of Byzantium mentions another Sidene in Lycia ; Sidous, 
a village near Corinth or a seaport in Megaris, had especially fine 
mUa (Lat. mala), which, from the name of the place may be 
understood as pomegranates ; Stephen of Byzantium knows of 
villages with the same name on the coast of Asia Minor near 
Klazomenae and Erythrse ; a town Sidoussa in Ionia is mentioned 
by Hecataeus in his voyage round Asia, and is also spoken of 
later. Side in Pamphylia, on whose coins is seen a pomegranate, 
lies indeed on the southern and more Syrian coast, but it was 
founded by ^Eolians from Kyme. Finally, far within Pontus, in 
the beautiful district of Sidene, stood the lofty coast-town of Side; 
whilst an older form of the name Sibde brings us back to Caria. 
As in Asia, so in Greece, the tree and its fruit served in the 
corresponding cults as the symbol of fructification and procreation, 
and again of death and destruction. There is a Phrygian colour- 
ing in the Theban legend which relates that a pomegranate-tree 
planted by the Furies grew on the grave of Eteocles, from the 
fruit of which, if plucked, blood flowed ; and in that other legend, 
according to which a pomegranate with fruit as red as blood grew 
on the tomb of Menoikeus, who, obeying the Delphic oracle, had 
killed himself on the approach of Polynices. On the figured 
chest of Cypselus in Hera's temple at Olympia, which was made 
in the first century of the Olympiads, and was still found in its 
place by Pausanias, the god Dionysus lay in a cave surrounded 
by vines, apple-trees, and pomegranate-trees. The statue of 
Hera by Polycletus, in her temple situated between Argos and 
Mycene, held in one hand the sceptre with the cuckoo, and in 
the other a pomegranate. Pausanias, describing this statue, refuses 
to explain the latter symbol, saying that it cannot be expressed. 
But it signified the earth-goddess, fructified by heaven and bear- 



1 82 THE POMEGRANATE-TREE. 

ing fruit, as the cuckoo signified the rainy spring-time during 
which the fructification takes place. The pomegranate is a 
significant feature in the myth of Pluto and Proserpine; the 
Homeric Hymn to Demeter tells how Persephone was forced in 
the under world to taste the pip of a pomegranate, that is, to unite 
sexually with Ai'doneus, and thereby become subject to him. As 
the pomegranate everywhere mystically symbolized the natural 
life, it could not be dedicated to Pallas Athena the intellectual 
goddess of chastity, the goddess of the state and city of Athens. 
It is therefore all the more striking when we hear that in the 
right hand of the unwinged statue of Athena Nike on the ascent 
of the Acropolis at Athens was a pomegranate, while the left hand 
held a helmet. But Cimon had erected the statue as a monument 
of his double victory on the Eurymedon, in witness of which he 
had caused the statue to be imitated from the Pallas of Side, a 
town close to the Eurymedon, by Kalamis. So that the goddess 
was a stranger, and her pomegranate was a symbol of the Asiatic 
region whence she had come, and where the Asiatics had just 
been defeated. 

No doubt the symbol of the pomegranate was also used in the 
worship of Hera in the Achaean cities of Italy, and the tree itself 
cultivated near temples and in gardens ; this is also confirmed by 
what is related of the statue of Milo of Kroton at Olympia ; the 
Magna-Grsecian athlete who lived about 520 b.c. was represented 
as a priest of Hera, bearing in his left hand a pomegranate. The 
intercourse of the Romans with the Greeks of Campania, who 
brought the Erycinian Aphrodite and the Sibylline books to 
Rome, must also have imparted a knowledge of that frequent 
symbol the pomegranate, and of the tree on which it grew. And, 
in fact, we find a pomegranate mentioned in one of the oldest 
portions of the Roman ritual ; the wife of the Flamen Dialis, who 
in manner and dress was an image of the Roman matron of the 
ancient time, wore on her head a branch of pomegranate, the ends 
of which were tied together with a thread of white wool, evidently 
as a sign of wedded fecundity; and her husband's head was 
adorned at the top with an olive branch. Here the pomegranate 
cannot be of younger date than the olive, which, as we have seen, 



POME GRA NA TE. 183 



was introduced into Italy about the time of the Tarquins. 
"Pomegranates imitated in clay, together with other votive offer- 
ings, have been found in quantities in the ancient tombs of South 
Italy, especially at Nola," says Gerhard. It is therefore very 
strange that the two Greek names of the fruit are not to be found 
in Italy, but, instead of them, the generic term malum with a 
defining adjective Punicum or granatum. The first adjective is 
very likely due to the fact that in the Carthaginian colonies, and 
then in Africa itself, the Romans found the reddest, sweetest, and 
juiciest fruit. On African soil, whither the tree had been trans- 
planted direct from its native home Canaan, the best kinds 
flourished, and there is no doubt that this product of Africa 
became celebrated among the Romans. Martial writes, on send- 
ing a basket of fruit to a friend : " Here there are no pipless (i.e., 
soft-pipped) African pomegranates, but homegrown fruit from my 
garden." And Rufus Festus Avienus, who lived towards the close 
of the fourth century B.C., and had been to Africa, begs his friend, 
in a little poem, to send him pomegranates from that country ; 
"Not that my own garden," he adds, "is without that fruit, but it 
is hard and sour, and not to be compared with the nectar produced 
by the warm sun of Africa." 

In the paradises of the Vandals in Africa, spoken of by Luxorius, 
the beautiful tree could not fail to be cultivated, as it was after- 
wards by the Arabs, the lovers of flowers and refreshing fruit-juices. 
The Portuguese to this day use the Arab name for the pomegranate, 
namely roma, ro?neira ; and from this Arab word is derived the 
Italian and French name for the steelyard, namely romano, romaine, 
because the Arab counter-balance had the form of a pomegranate. 
The city of Granada, founded by the Moors in the tenth century, 
is said to have been named after the pomegranate, the figure of 
which was adopted in the arms of the city, and still adorns all the 
streets and public buildings. 

In Italy the tree is commonly mentioned by ancient authors, 
from Cato downwards; Pliny in the Imperial period could 
enumerate many kinds used in various ways. There are wild 
pomegranate trees — that is, trees that have gone wild — both in 
modern Greece and Italy, in the form of thorny hedges with 



1 84 THE POMEGRANATE-TREE. 

uneatable fruit; in these countries even the cultivated kinds do 
not grow so large nor produce fruit of such a rich flavour as the 
pomegranates for which Asia is celebrated. In Italy the beautiful 
red fruit is placed on the table more to please the eye than to be 
eaten. And the lemon has robbed the pomegranate of the place it 
once held in the estimation of the ancients. But even now, after 
the lapse of so many centuries, popular fancy in Greece still con- 
nects the pomegranate with the idea of abundance and incalculable 
number (note 54), and a present of the scarlet blossom is a symbol 
of the most ardent love. The fact that the word punicum has not 
been preserved in any of the modern Latin languages, is a proof 
that it never became really popular. 



THE QUINCE. 

(PYRUS CYDONIA. CYDONIA VULGARIS.) 

Under the general name of apples the ancients included not only 
the pomegranate but the quince ; which is our reason for speaking 
of that fruit next. The " golden apples " of the Hesperides and 
of Atalanta were idealized quinces ; and the apple dedicated to 
Venus and used as a bridal gift, and in all kinds of girls' games 
and love games, was also no other than the quince. Its colour, 
like that of the pomegranate, made a lively impression on the 
natural man when first seen. The quince could not be eaten raw, 
but when preserved in wine, must, oil, and especially honey, it 
gave a very fine aroma and taste to those materials. Its Greek 
name of Cydonian apple, throws a welcome light on the history of 
the tree. It proves that the quince first came to the Greeks from 
Crete, the land of the Cydonians, who dwelt on the north-western 
coast of that island near the river Jardanus, and — whether of 
Semitic race or not — were some of the oldest and half-mythic 
inhabitants. Their city, Cydonia, was the mater urbium of the 
country, and the fact of the quince being named after it assigns a 
very early date both to its introduction and to its extension to the 
Greeks. The first written mention of the tree is to be found in 
Alkman (middle of seventh century B.C.). Soon after, six hundred 
years before Christ, it is named by the Siculian poet Stesichorus. 
About that time Solon decreed that a bride, before entering the 
bridal chamber, should eat a Cydonian apple, evidently to con- 
secrate herself to the service of Aphrodite ; the decree being a 
mere confirmation of an old Attic custom. The tree must also 
have been cultivated by the Italiote Greeks about this time, for 



1 86 THE QUIXCE. 



Ibycus of Rhegium, a born Italiote (middle of sixth century B.C.), 
speaks of Cydonian apple-trees in well- watered gardens. The 
golden apples could not fail to charm the surrounding barbarians. 
The early existence of the fruit in Italy is proved not only by the 
Latinizing of its name in the people's mouth, mala coto?iea> instead 
of Cydo7iia, but also by a passage in Propertius, where that poet 
compares the simplicity of former times with later luxury : " Once," 
he says, " the young people gave each other quinces shaken down 
from the tree, and basketfuls of blackberries, but now it must be 
gillyflowers and lustrous lilies," etc. Columella and Pliny men- 
tion several kinds of quinces, among them the ??ialu?n strutheinn^ 
literally sparrow-apple, which was already mentioned by Cato, and 
was therefore older than the third Punic war. In Pliny's time 
quinces were placed in rooms for the sake of their agreeable 
perfume, just as they are now ; and the ancients made a sweet 
confection from them like the modern Italian cotognata. The 
7neli7tiela, literally honey-apples, mentioned by Varro, Horace, and 
Martial, are explained by modern commentators as meaning 
especially sweet apples; but that they were a variety of quince 
suitable for cooking with must, and afterwards in honey, is proved 
not only by the Schol. Cruq., but by the Spanish 77ie77ibrillo and 
Portuguese ?7iar77ielo, quince-jelly ; from the Portuguese word is 
derived the European word marmalade. The above-named 
Spanish marmalade was already exported to Rome in the time of 
Galen. The quince-tree is not very common in Italy now, cer- 
tainly much rarer than it was in ancient times, when the pineapple 
and orange were still unknown. In the East, on the contrary, 
and all over Eastern Europe, that region of preserves and confec- 
tioner}-, the quince was through the Middle Ages, and is to the 
present time, a cheap and common sweetmeat of loungers in the 
bazaars ; of which we see a striking proof in the variety of names 
bestowed on it by the different Slav nations, some of them being 
Persian and Turkish words. 



THE ROSE THE 1.2 L Y. 

(rosa gallica, centifolia.) (lilium candidum.) 

The flowers of the East seemed no less wonderful and attractive 
to the warriors, shepherds, and husbandmen of the West than the 
golden and scarlet fruits of which we have spoken. In the East, 
flowers were trained, improved, and made into ointments and 
washes by the children of an effeminate civilization, who lived only 
to please their despots and perform religious rites. Roses and 
lilies were already known to the Greeks in the period of the 
Epics : at first only by report as something splendid in shape and 
colour, and then in the form of scented oils, till gradually the 
plants themselves were introduced. Both flowers are employed 
by Homer and Hesiod in figures of speech. Those poets call 
Aurora (the dawn) rosy -fingered ; in a Homeric Hymn she is 
rosy-armed, and the same epithet is applied to two daughters of 
Nereus. Venus anoints the corpse of Hector with rose-scented 
oil; Hector threatens to mangle the lily-tender skin of Ajax with 
his spear ; the voices of cicadas and of the Muses are termed lily- 
voices. All these are mere comparisons, possibly taken from 
things which the poet only knew by hearsay ; and indeed an 
ancient critic asks how it is that Homer was acquainted with rose- 
oil, but did not know the rose. The flowers themselves do appear 
in the Hymn to Demeter — that venerable record of the ancient 
Eleusinian worship of the goddess — but still in a strange fantastic 
guise : Proserpine plays with her companions in a meadow, pluck- 
ing roses (the flower being apparently scattered over an ideal 
meadow, not plucked off a bush nor protected by thorns) ; then, 
besides crocuses, violets, and irises, she picks the Narcissus, a 



1 88 THE ROSE. THE LILY. 

newly-created wonder, at whose sight men and gods are astonished, 
rearing its hundred heads from one root, rejoicing sea, earth, and 
sky with its perfume — evidently a glorification of the symbol of the 
Narcissus used in mysteries, which, as its name proves, was origin- 
ally only the representative of intoxicating, exotic floral scents in 
general. In a later part of the same hymn, Proserpine tells her 
mother how she played in the charming meadow, and plucked 
" cups of roses and lilies too, a marvel to look at " — expressing 
the rarity and fabulous character of those splendid flowers. Some 
of the names of the nymphs accompanying Proserpine are taken 
from the rose : Rhodeia, Rhodope (the rosy), Okyroe kalykopis 
(O. with a face like a rose-cup) ; and the same adjective is ap- 
plied to a nymph in the Hymn to Aphrodite. At last, in a frag- 
ment of Archilochus — who lived a generation earlier, but whose 
sphere was wider than that of the Eleusinian temple-poetry, and 
included Thrace and Lydia as well as the Islands — we have the 
rose-bush itself, w r hose blossoms, with sprays of myrtle, adorn a 
maiden, doubtless Neobule, the beloved of the poet. A hundred 
years after, the rose became Sappho's favourite flower ; in her 
poems she sings its praise, and uses it as a simile for beautiful 
girls. From that time we find the rose and lily installed among 
the festive decorations of the joyous Greeks, and everywhere inti- 
mately connected with the life and customs of that nation. Now, 
where did those plants come from ? In what part of the East, 
and among what people had the Rosa gallica — itself a native of 
Europe, and the parent form of the centifolia — been transformed 
by cultivation into the sweet-scented rose of the sixty or hundred 
leaves ? 

It is not surprising to find the rose named in the apocryphal 
books of the Old Testament, for those books belong to the 
Grecian age ; but, if we follow Luther's translation, we find the 
rose mentioned in the older parts of the Bible, for example by 
Hosea (xiv. 5), who lived in the eighth century B.C. : "I will be 
as the dew unto Israel ; he shall bloom like the rose" So, in 
Solomon's Song ii. 1, 2 : " I am a flower in Sharon, and a 
rose in the valley. As a rose among thorns, so is my love 
among the daughters." [English readers will remember that 



THE ROSE. THE LILY. 189 

their Bible changes " rose " every time into " lily," though 
its "rose of Sharon" is a blunder similar to Luther's.] But 
Luther, following the Rabbinical interpretation, has wrongly 
translated the Hebrew susan, susannah, by rose ; it really 
meant the lily, and not so much the white lily, Lilium can- 
didum (Grk. leirion), as the coloured fire-lily (Grk. krinon, by 
which the Septuagint translates it), or even more probably a 
species of the bell-shaped crown-imperial, fritillaria. It follows 
that the Greeks were earlier acquainted with the cultivated gar- 
den-rose than the Hebrews, and that it is consequently not a 
Semitic plant. The absence of the rose in the sculptures and 
paintings of ancient Egypt, in which floral ornamentation is not 
wanting, is another proof of the above assertion ; and Herodotus, 
in his descriptions of Egyptian customs, only mentions the lotus 
flower and the rose-like krinea (note 55). 

Being now, in what relates to these two flowers, the rose and 
the lily, directed to Central Asia, we are greatly assisted by 
language, which so often reveals depths in the primitive world to 
which no history can penetrate. The Greek rhodon, in an older 
form brodon, the rose, and lemon, the lily, are originally Iranic 
words (note 56) ; so that both the names and the plants came to 
Greece from Media by way of Armenia and Phrygia. 

Bright and glowing Persia is still the very land of flowers. The 
geographer Ritter says of Teheran : " The rose flourishes here in 
a perfection unknown in other regions of the world. Nowhere 
else is it so extensively planted nor so highly valued. Gardens 
and courts are filled with roses ; rooms are crowded with rose- 
pots, and roses are strewn in the baths and constantly renewed 
from the ever-blossoming bushes. Even the kalium (a kind of 
hookah) of the poorest smoker in Persia is decorated with the 
hundred-leaved rose, and a smell of roses pervades everything." 
The poems of Hafiz have made all the reading world acquainted 
with the roses of Shiraz, in South Persia. In the time of Hero- 
dotus the Babylonians had already adopted the use of roses from 
their Medo-Persian conquerors. " Every Babylonian," says Hero- 
dotus, " has on his staff the figure of either an apple, a rose, a 
krinon, an eagle, or some other object." But the rose migrated 



igo THE ROSE. THE LILY. 

to Greece, as unmistakable traces in ancient fables prove, by way 
of Phrygia, Thrace, and Macedonia. The Nyseian fields, where 
Proserpine plucked roses and lilies, are to be imagined as lying 
in Thrace, and the name of her nymph, Rhodope, is also the name 
of the Thracian mountain into which that nymph was to be 
transformed. According to Herodotus, the so-called garden of 
Midas, son of Gordias, lay at the foot of Mount Bermion, in 
Macedonia, where Strabo says the Brigians lived, who in Asia 
were called Phrygians. In that garden the sixty-leaved rose, 
whose scent was more delicious than that of any other, grew 
spontaneously. The Alexandrian poet Nicander expresses him- 
self still more clearly, only that he makes use of the learned 
terminology of his time and school : Midas of Odonia (Edonia, 
a district of Thrace), after leaving Asis (in Asia Minor), was 
the first to plant in Emathian gardens (Emathia, a district 
in Macedonia) the sixty-leaved rose. Here the Old Baby- 
lonian number sixty is noticeable and of itself points to an 
Asiatic origin. Theophrastus also mentions the neighbourhood 
of Philippi, towards Macedonia, as the home of the full rose, 
which he already calls " hundred-leaved ; " the inhabitants 
are said to have found it on the neighbouring Mount Pan- 
gaeus, which was rich in gold and silver. And a fragment of 
Sappho, an ancient authority of great weight, points to the same 
region. Again, in the myths that cluster round the rose, we hear 
an echo of the Phrygian worship of nature. It is dedicated to 
Aphrodite ; it is also the flower of Dionysus ; it is at once the 
symbol of love and of death. How it came into being when 
Attis (the Phrygian Adonis) died, is variously related. Aphrodite 
creates it out of Adonis's blood ; or that goddess, on hearing of 
her beloved's death, comes running through thorn-bushes, she 
wounds her foot, and her blood turns the white rose red; or 
again — and this seems the true Phrygian form of the myth — the 
flower springs up spontaneously from the blood of Adonis, as the 
pomegranate and almond do in similar cases : " For each red 
drop she sheds a tear ; fall'n to the ground, both turn to flowers 
— his blood to roses, to anemones her tears " (Bion). 

It was fabled of the Lily, the rosa Junonis, that it was made of 



THE ROSE. THE LILY. 191 

Hera's milk while she suckled Herakles in her sleep. The lily, 
with its pure unspotted colour, was an eyesore to Aphrodite ; and 
she, to put the chaste flower to the blush, inserted the yellow 
pistil, suggestive of the wanton ass. 

The garden-rose of the East was very early taken to Italy by the 
Greek colonists, as is proved by the popular transformation of 
rhodon into rosa ; and with it probably went the lily, lilium (note 
57). From Italy, without any change of name, both flowers have 
spread all over the world ; but the farther they go north, the more 
they lose the strength and sweetness of the perfume that breathes 
around them in their native home. However, the rose throve 
well under the Italian skies ; it remained in bloom the greater 
part of the year, according to its varieties, of which the rose of 
Campania is said to have been the earliest, and that of Praeneste 
the latest. Campania produced the centifolia, and the Paestum 
roses were famed for blossoming twice a year. Rosa, mea rosa, is 
already a term of endearment in the comedies of Plautus, and 
Cicero associates the rose with a life of luxury : " The fortitude of 
Regulus made him happier than Thorius swilling amid roses." It 
may have been only Oriental extravagance when Cleopatra caused 
the floor of the hall at Tarsus, in which she feasted Antony, to be 
covered three feet thick with roses ; and it was in imitation of 
Bithynian kings that Verres, propraetor in Sicily, rode in a litter, 
the cushions of which were stuffed with roses, and held to his 
nose a net of fine lace filled with roses. But a glance at the 
lyrical or elegiac poets shows how the rose was everywhere con- 
nected with love and pleasure in Italy. The festive board is 
hidden under roses ; lovers lie on roses \ the floor is strewn with 
roses ; the dancer, the flute-player, the boy who serves the wine — 
all wear wreaths of roses. The drinker crowns both himself and 
his wine-cup with roses. Roses and the revel of the senses are 
inseparable. And that the rose was also a flower of the tomb, 
that roses as well as tears were sprinkled on the dead, is a very 
ancient and psychologically not far-fetched idea and custom, one 
that was common in Italy, and proved by numerous epitaphs. 
For the rose that issued from the blood of the dying god of nature 
is as fleeting as it is fair : " Tf thou hast passed by a rose, seek it 



19-2 THE ROSE. THE LILY. 

not again," says a Greek proverb ; and the Italian saying runs •. 
" There is no rose of a hundred days." The rose represents the 
greatest, though but a momentary, fulness of life ; and for the sake 
of the former quality, it is thirsted for, like wine and blood, by the 
pining shadows in the realms of the dead. 

Roses were used in the composition of essences, sweet-waters, 
and ointments, and, in the form of rose- wine and rose-water, in 
pharmacy, and even, as ancient writers report, in the kitchens of 
rich epicures. No wonder that rose-gardens were abundant, and 
that their produce, as well as that of lily-beds, were offered for sale 
by flower-sellers. Even before the fall of the Republic, Varro 
advises persons who have property near the city to plant violets 
and roses as a profitable speculation, and names the best season 
for doing so. But far away, as far as Campania and Paestum, the 
needs of the rich and enormous capital were provided for by- 
extensive flower-gardens. During the Imperial Age, when luxury 
was constantly increasing and Oriental manners were imitated, a 
senseless extravagance in the use of flowers was the fashion. To 
possess roses in summer was too common by far, one must have 
them in winter and early spring : " Do not those who desire 
roses in winter live contrary to nature ? " complains the philosopher 
Seneca ; and Macrobius names " snow in summer, and roses in 
winter," as parallel requirements of luxury. Martial reports that 
winter roses were brought in ships from Egypt, and that roses and 
lilies were grown under glass in Rome. In all this the Orientals 
had preceded the Romans. Florus relates of Antiochus the Great, 
a true Greco- Oriental despot, that, after commencing the war with 
the Romans, and taking the islands, he' caused tents of silk 
embroidered with gold to be erected on the Euripus, which is a 
flowing water; and there he enjoyed every luxury, even roses in 
winter; — the Romans soon drove him home again, "already con- 
quered by his own luxury," adds the author. The later Roman 
emperors were equally luxurious. L. ^Elius Verus, his biographer 
tells us, invented a new kind of bed, stuffed with rose leaves, from 
which the white parts had been taken away, covered with a carpet 
of lily-leaves, the whole enclosed in a fine net. He lay at table on 
cushions stuffed with washed roses and lilies. Still more extrava- 



THE ROSE. THE LILY. 193 

gant things are related of Heliogabalus. This emperor of Syrian 
origin not only caused all the rooms of his palace to be carpeted 
with roses, lilies, violets, hyacinths, and narcissus, but his guests 
were so deeply imbedded in flowers while reclining at table, that 
some of them, being probably heavy with wine, were unable to 
rise, and died of suffocation. 

Through all the wars and destruction of the Middle Ages, the 
rose and lily, easy to train, and appreciated by the rudest of men, 
continued to be cultivated. The mediaeval poets, who have not 
many colours at command, make abundant use of the rose and 
lily in their descriptions. Both were taken into the service of 
religion as favourite symbols. The beauty and graciousness of 
the Virgin were emblemed by the rose, and heavenly purity by the 
lily. Gothic churches adorned themselves with mystic roses of 
stone; in pictures of the Annunciation the angel carries a lily-stalk, 
sometimes — and this is characteristic — the cup being represented 
without pistils. 

Both flowers were employed in the heraldry of that figurative 
period. Well known are the three lilies (said to have been originally 
spear-heads) in the royal arms of France, which were appropriately 
bestowed on the Maid of Orleans at her elevation to the peerage : 
and the Red and White Roses of the contending dynasties of 
England. Among the innumerable particulars in connexion with 
our subject that may be gathered from the religion, art, and 
manners of the Middle Ages, we will mention two, both of which 
were fundamentally derived from the same source : we mean the 
so-called Golden Rose of the popes, and the mythical figure of the 
Rusalka among part of the Slav nations. On the fourth Sunday 
in Lent, which falls in spring, the pope, dressed in white, con- 
secrated on the altar of a chapel adorned with roses, in the pre- 
sence of the College of Cardinals, a golden rose, which was 
afterwards presented as ensuring a blessing to princes and 
princesses, and even to churches and towns. The pope dipped 
the rose in balsam, sprinkled it with holy water and incense, and 
prayed to Christ as the Flower of the field and the Lily of the 
valley. Shortly before the Reformation, Frederic the Wise, 
Elector of Saxony, received the Golden Rose ; and in our time it 

13 



194 THE ROSE. THE LILY. 

has been bestowed on the ill-fated Empress Charlotte of Mexico, 
and the pious Isabella II. of Spain. Notes relating to this peculiar 
custom may be found as far back as the eleventh century, when 
Leo IX. was pope ; but its origin is evidently connected with the 
ancient Roman conception of the rose as the symbol both of life 
and of perishableness, which in the hand of a conqueror expressed 
not only his glory and his joy, but also his mortality and humility. 
Equally interesting is the Slavic Rusalka, as a living proof 
that nations, still mere worshippers of nature, are apt to form 
mythic personifications out of small circumstances, the sound of 
a word, general ideas, and foreign influences. Rose-festivals, 
rosaria, rosah'a, were still celebrated in Rome shortly before the 
fall of the Empire on certain days in May and June; and consisted 
in decorating tombs with roses, and in social banquets at which 
roses, the product of the season, were presented to the guests. So, 
among the Romanized country-folk in the Illyrian peninsula and 
on the Danube, such spring or summer festivals were held under 
the Latin name of rousalia ; there, no doubt, in continuation of the 
Dionysiac summer festivals traditional among the Thracian peoples, 
and the enjoyment of roses inseparable from them. In the 
Christian era, Whitsuntide, which occurred in May, inherited the 
rosalia ; and was called the pascha rosata or rosarum (to this day 
it is called by the Roman populace pasqua rosa or, by mistake, 
pasqua rugiadd) ; and on Whitsunday, the so-called Domenica de 
rosa, roses were let down to the people from the roofs of churches. 
Afterwards, in the sixth century, when swarms of Slavs occupied 
the countries on the Middle and Lower Danube, and east and south 
of the Carpathians, halting between heathenism and Christianity, 
the Christian Whitsuntide, or rose-feast, naturally became amalga- 
mated with the heathen Spring-feast of the barbarians. Among 
the Slovens, Serbs, White and Little Russians, and Slovaks, this 
Whitsun or Spring-festival was called rusaliya; and out of the feast 
was developed, among the White and part of the Little Russians, 
a belief in supernatural female beings who frequented the fields 
and woods at that season, t.e., the Rusalkas, a mythic counterpart 
of the gay and roving Slav maidens who bound wreaths and 
interrogated self-invented oracles. Miklosich, in 1864, first gave 



THE VIOLET. 195 



this explanation of the historical origin of that belief. In Germany, 
too, the southern rose and the Italian rose-festival became mingled 
with the Old-German notion of a fight between Winter and 
Summer ; as the Slavs received this form of the festival and this 
dressing of the myth from the Lower Danube, so the Germans 
received it from the Celtic-Roman Tyrol and Italy. 

In modern times floriculture has produced innumerable varie- 
ties of the Rose, of all shapes and colours, and provided them 
with fancy names. Periods have not been wanting when the 
rose was supplanted for a time by flowers brought from distant 
countries, by dahlias, camellias, azaleas, etc. ; but in spite of 
changes in fashion, the rose will always re-establish her reign as 
queen of flowers. In countries north of the Alps, especially in 
England, art may occasionally improve and perfect the flower; 
but it will never be so intimately connected with life, nor blossom 
almost all the year round in gardens and on walls, as it does 
under the bright skies of Naples. The cultivation of the rose 
has been well prosecuted in the East, so far as that part of the 
world has not lapsed into barbarism. The rose was always 
celebrated in Eastern poetry, and the loves of the rose and 
nightingale were constantly sung ; even now the petals collected 
from vast rose-fields are used in the preparation of costly essences 
and confectionery. Old Busbequius in the sixteenth century tells 
us in his first letter from Constantinople, that the Turks would 
not allow a rose-leaf to lie on the ground, for they believed that 
the rose sprang out of the drops of sweat that fell from Mahomet's 
brow — still the same unextinguished legend of Adonis, only trans- 
lated into prose and Islamite. On the so-called grave of Ali near 
Messar, in the vicinity of modern Balkh and ancient Bactra, the 
traveller Vambery saw the wonder-working red roses {giili surkh), 
which really seemed to him to excel all others in colour and 
scent, and which have never been planted elsewhere, because the 
local Islamite legend says they will thrive nowhere else. 

The ancients, as some of our citations show, often mention the 
Violet, or Pansy, together with the rose and lily, as an ornament 
of the garden and of the person. Its history runs parallel with 
that of the rose. As a garden-flower and in its improved forms, 



[96 THE ROSE. THE LILY. 



the viola also came from Asia Minor. Homer uses ion in making 
descriptive adjectives {io-eides, io-dnefihes, io-eis), but only with 
reference to its dark colour, not to the scent. Once in the 
Odyssey ion itself appears in the description of the wondrous 
scenery around Calypso's cave, where it grows in moist meadows 
with the parsley : " bad company for it," says Fraas ; but even 
here it means any dark-coloured flower, whether scented or not. 
Afterwards a distinction was made between the dark and the 
variegated light-coloured violet, which latter generally meant both 
the gillyflower (Matthiolaincana), and the wall-flower {Cheiranthus 
cheiri). The Latin viola was doubtless derived from the Greek 
ion (originally vion), and we may therefore conclude that the 
cultivation of the violet was introduced by way of Greece which 
itself owed its knowledge of the plant to Asia. 



THE SAFFRON. 

(crocus sativus.) 

Another flower, early celebrated, equal to the rose in esteem, 
and excelling it in practical utility, was the Oriental saffron 
(Crocus sativus), the dignified aristocratic cousin of the modest 
European crocus of springtime, Crocus vermis. Besides its odour, 
which enchanted the ancient peoples of the East, and later those 
of Europe, a lasting yellow dye was obtained from the stigma of 
the flower. Garments, veils, and shoes dipped in this dye seemed 
to the eyes of the oldest founders of religion and culture in Asia 
as glorious as purple, both in themselves and as expressing light 
and majesty; for the fettered intellect of those dreamy times 
could not separate reality from symbol. "You Phrygians love 
garments dyed in saffron and gaudy purple, sleeved tunics, fillets 
round the head, and inaction," cries Romulus to the Trojans 
(^Eneid, book 9, line 614). Saffron-yellow shoes formed part of the 
dress of the Persian kings, which was copied from the older Baby- 
lonio-Median costume. In ^Eschylus's "Persians," the chorus sum- 
mons dead Darius from the nether-world with the words : " Rise, 
ancient ruler, rise ; come with the saffron-dyed eumaris on thy 
feet, the royal tiara on thy head ! " The oldest mythic-poetical 
representations of the Greeks show traces of the sanctity attributed 
by Eastern nations to pure bright saffron-yellow. When Jason 
the Argonaut prepares to plough the field in Colchis with the 
fire-breathing bulls, he throws off the saffron-coloured garment 
with which he is clothed. Bacchus, the Oriental god, wears the 
krokotos, the saffron dress, and so do the reeling participators in 
the joyous feasts celebrated in his service. The new-born 



198 THE SAFFRON. 



Herakles is described by Pindar as swathed in crocus-yellow 
cloths. 

But especially goddesses, nymphs, queens, and vestals are 
imagined clothed with saffron-yellow garments, or such as are 
ornamented with that colour. The Attic virgins embroider with 
many colours the crocus-dress of Pallas Athena. Antigone, in 
her despair at the deaths of her mother and brothers, lets fall the 
royal crocus-coloured stolis which adorned her in the days of her 
pride and joy ; so does Iphigenia when preparing to be sacrificed 
at Aulis. Venus clothes Medea in her own crocus-woven gar- 
ment. Andromeda chained to the rocks (or rather Mnesilochus 
disguised as such) has assumed the krokoeis. Helena takes with 
her from Mycenae her gold -embroidered palla and crocus-bor- 
dered veil, the gifts of her mother Leda. In the Epics, Eos (the 
dawn) is always krokopeplos, saffron-veiled ; so is the river-nymph 
Telesto in Hesiod, and Enyo the daughter of Phorkys and Keto; 
so are the Muses in Alkman. The hair of the maidens in a 
myth is commonly of saffron hue, as that of Ariadne at Naxos 
(Ovid), and of the fair daughters of Keleos hurrying, with their 
skirts tucked up, to the well by which Demeter sits (Hymn to 
Dem.). 

Thus an acquaintance with the saffron dye can be traced back 
to the period when the heroic myth was developing ; that it was 
obtained from the East, the word krokos itself would prove if the 
fact were at all doubtful. The Hebrew form of the word was 
karkom, as is seen in Solomon's Song iv. 14; the form would 
vary in other Semitic dialects, but the sound on the whole remain 
the same. In Cilicia was a promontory Korykos, and not far 
from it the Corycian Hollow, where, in a valley, grew the finest 
of genuine saffron ; it is natural to suppose that both hill and 
valley took their names from the plant. In so far as Greece is 
concerned, it is indifferent whether the Semitic word was, or was 
not, derived from an Indian word that had been introduced by 
primitive traffic ; the Greeks, at all events, received the yellow or 
yellow-broidered garments as costly wares from the Semites. 
This must have happened during, and even before, the epic 
period ; it is another question whether the Homeric singers had 



THE SAFFRON. 199 



ever seen the flower itself. It is true that Homer makes crocuses, 
lotuses, and hyacinths spring from the earth at the union of 
Jupiter and Juno on Mount Ida : 

"And clustering lotus swell the rising bed, 
And sudden hyacinths the turf bestrow, 
And flaming crocus made the mountain glow " — Iliad ; 

but no doubt the poet would adorn the ideal bridal-bed of Heaven 
and Earth with the most glorious things he had ever heard of far 
and near. Again, crocuses grow on those mythic meadows, the 
scenes of the adventures of gods, as when Proserpine is carried 
off by Pluto while '• picking roses, crocuses, and violets on the 
tender mead." Creusa the daughter of Erechtheus is pictured by 
Euripides as filling her lap with the golden crocus when surprised 
by Apollo. The companions of Europa, when Jupiter approached 
her in the form of a bull, are busy gathering the fragrant hair of 
the golden crocus ; and when Pan and the nymphs pass singing 
through the lush meadow, the crocus and hyacinth bloom fragrant 
mid the tangled growth of grasses. When fancy invented these 
scenes, attention can hardly have been awakened by the humble 
native kinds of crocus ; the foreign Asiatic plant was always 
meant. In Sophocles' glorious song of triumph on Kolonos, the 
actual spring-flowers growing on the spot were transformed in the 
eyes of the enthusiastic poet into the golden Crocus sativus of the 
East. 

Theophrastus already distinguished the wild or u mountain " 
crocus, i.e., Crocus vermis ; from the "tame" and scented. He 
calls the former the white, and a third kind the thorny crocus ; 
both without scent. But the flower lost part of its aroma in 
colder Europe, where it easily degenerates. Of all the places 
inhabited by Greeks, the crocus of Cyrene, on the African coast, 
bore away the palm. 

In the Roman gardens we find the crocus as well as the rose, 
lily, and violet. But the flower was a stranger, and its cultivation 
a triumph of the art of acclimatization, for Columella ranks it 
with cassia and myrrh. Pliny said it was not worth while to 
plant the saffron in Italy ; yet it must have been cultivated there, 
for Sicilian saffron is praised, and compared with the Italian. 



THE SAFFRON. 



At any rate, what cultivation there was did not suffice to supply 
the market, and quantities of saffron, partly raw, partly in the 
form of essences, salves, medicines, and dyed stuffs, were imported 
from the sunnier East. Opinions were divided as to where the 
best grew. Theophrastus praised that of Cyrene, Virgil that of 
the Tmolus mountains in Lydia. The saffron from Mount 
Corycus in Cilicia was generally esteemed the finest, that of the 
Lycian Mount Olympus next, and lastly that of the ^Eolian town 
of Algae in Asia Minor. Pliny gives the third place to the 
saffron of Centuripse in Sicily, a town at the foot of Etna. When 
Roman luxury was at its height, crocus-scent and crocus-flowers 
were used as lavishly as rose-leaves. Even under the Republic 
it was customary to sprinkle saffron- water in the theatres for the 
sake of the sweet smell ; and a banquet being given in honour 
of Metellus Pius, the banqueting-hall was adorned like a temple, 
and the floor strewed with crocus-flowers; therefore it is not 
surprising when we learn that in the Imperial age the statues in 
the theatre dropped with saffron-juice ; or that Heliogabalus 
bathed in saffron-water, and made his guests lie on cushions 
stuffed with crocus-leaves. Saffron was also largely used in 
medicine and for cooking. It was a favourite spice in meats and 
drinks, and it was rarely wanting in a medicinal recipe. The 
estimation in which saffron was held by the ancients remained 
undiminished or even increased during the childishly dependent 
Middle Ages. The story goes, that in the reign of Edward III. 
a pilgrim brought a saffron-bulb to England from the Holy Land 
in the hollow of a stick, for the costliest things on earth were only 
to be obtained secretly and at the risk of life. In reality it was 
the Arabs who introduced the cultivation of saffron into Europe ; 
they succeeded in accomplishing what had either been tried in 
vain by the ancients or never attempted in earnest. From the 
Spain of that time date the saffron-fields in the Mediterranean 
countries, where the Arabic name of " saffron " (Ital. zajferano, 
Span, azafran) has quite supplanted the Greco-Latin " crocus," 
which itself must have come from the confines of the same 
Arabia some fifteen or twenty centuries before. The only thing 
in which the times have changed is, that people have become 



THE SAFFRON. 201 



indifferent to the aroma of this flower ; they neither think the 
taste and smell charming, nor depend on it exclusively for impart- 
ing a bright yellow to stuff and leather ; and this is the case not 
only in Europe, but, what is more remarkable, in the East also. 
This decline of saffron in Asia proves that even in that stationary 
part of the world, so fettered by immutable natural conditions, 
slow changes do take place in long periods of time, and the 
nerves acquire a new tone. 

We will add that a similar but less important dye-yielding plant, 
the Safflow or ZafTer (Cart/iamus tinctorius), a kind of thistle native 
to the East Indies, had become known to the Greeks by way of 
Egypt. Its Greek name knekos is somewhat like the Indian one, 
and doubtless came through the intermediate country mentioned. 
Theophrastus and Aristotle were acquainted with the name, and 
Theocritus uses it as an adjective in the sense of yellowish. 
Theophrastus does not mention the use of the plant as a dye, 
though that must have been the sole reason of its propagation. 
The seed is eaten in modern Egypt, and in Italy it is used for 
curdling milk. But the Arabs were the first to teach its cultiva- 
tion on a large scale, and its use as a red and yellow dye ; from 
them too came its name, in Italian asforo, as/iori, in German 
saflor, and in English safflow or zafifer. etc. 



THE DA TE-PALM. 

(PHCENIX DACTYLIFERA.) 

The date-palm is, according to Ritter, the true "representative of 
the subtropical rainless zone of the Old World," a zone of which 
Babylon, the palm-surrounded capital of the Semitic nations, may 
be called the central point. The tree thrives best between the 
19th and 35th degrees of north latitude; south of the Indus 
mouth, and equally in Darfour (i3°-i5°) it no longer exists ; 
more to the north it needs a mean annual temperature of from 
21 to 23 Centigrade to bear edible fruit. It requires a sandy 
soil and the scorching heat of the desert; while, on the other hand, 
humidity is equally necessary to nourish its thirsty roots. " The 
King of the Oasis," says the Arab, "bathes his feet in water and 
his head in heaven's fire." No storm can break or uproot a date- 
palm, for its trunk consists of the intertwined fibres of the leaf- 
stalks, while the ramifications of its roots crossing one another 
chain it to the ground. It attains a height of fifty feet and more, 
and grows slowly, arriving at its full prime in about a hundred 
years. From that time it begins to decay. No sunlight can 
penetrate the sheltering roof formed by its drooping, whispering 
leaves ; under it are shade and coolness and fresh-water springs, 
and small fruit-trees and other plants cover the ground. All the 
Arab villages or single huts are buried in a grove of palm-trees, 
and the traveller in the desert rejoices when he sees their dark 
outlines appear above the horizon, sure that he will there find a 
human habitation and hospitality. " Honour the date-palm," the 
Prophet is said to have taught, " for it is your aunt on your 
father's side ; it is made of the same stuff as Adam, and is the 



THE DATE-PALM. 



203 



only tree that is artificially fructified.'' At the present time the 
date is the daily bread of the Arab, and the most important 
article of trade in Arabia. But the tree was not always so 
valuable as it is now. It was the hand of man that made the 
fruit sweet and fit to eat, so that whole tribes can now live almost 
exclusively upon it. 

The most ancient notices of the date-palm do not speak of it as 
a fruit-bearing tree. The art of cultivating it was first discovered 
and practised, according to Ritter, by the Nabatseans of Babylonia, 
in the plains bordering the lower Euphrates and Tigris. In that 
region forests of fruit-bearing palms stretched continuously for 
miles ; there the tree almost sufficed for all the necessities of life. 
Strabo mentions a Persian (Plutarch says a Babylonian) hymn, in 
which 360 different uses of the palm-tree are enumerated (360 is 
the mystic astrological number of the Egyptians, repeated in the 
360 ladies of the Persian king who fell into the hands of the 
Macedonians). From the region of the Euphrates and Tigris the 
cultivated date-palm spread to Jericho, Phoenicia, the ^Elanitian 
Gulf in the Red Sea, and elsewhere. This remarkable fact in the 
history of cultivation can only be paralleled by another, i.e.., that the 
camel was first introduced into Africa as late as the third century 
of the Christian era, although that animal seems expressly made 
for the Libyan desert, and has opened that impenetrable region 
to foreign nations, their trade, and their religion. Brugsch, in his 
" Histoire d'Egypte," says : " Noils remarquons que le chameau, 
V animal le plus utile aujouroVhui en Egyfite, ne se rencontre jamais 
sur les monuments " (note 58). The camel and the date-palm, 
two organisms that are intrinsically akin, and subject to the same 
conditions of existence, not only belong originally to the Semites of 
the desert and oasis, the nation of bitter toil and dreamy leisure, but 
were, so to speak, created by that nation, which tamed and bred 
the camel, and cultivated the wild palm till it bore honeyed fruit, 
thus rendering a whole region of the earth fit for human habitation. 

The climatic conditions on which the date-palm depends natur- 
ally forbid any introduction of it into Europe in the sense in which 
we speak of the vine, the olive, and the cherry-tree having found a 
second home there. The date-palm was indeed planted and lived 



204 THE DATE-PALM. 



on the northern edge of the Mediterranean, but it no longer bore 
fruit. It was a charming and strange ornament to the landscape, 
lending to it a transient gleam of the sunny eastern lands that lay 
beyond ; it was regarded as a marvel of nature by the inhabitant 
of the northern mountains when he descended to the coast ; but 
he could not, like the Oriental, securely link his destiny with it, 
and dream away his time beneath its shadow, inventing and 
listening to fairy-tales ; his was a more laborious lot under the 
inclement sky of Europe. It is true that all tree-culture, though 
demanding a thoughtful and connected course of action, is an 
easier, and, in a sense, humaner occupation ; but of life under the 
date-palm this is so excessively true, that here Man, finding his 
wants provided with little action of his own, lies for ever shackled 
by a gloomy fatalism; and beneath the dignified repose that 
seldom leaves him a ferocious passion slumbers. 

From whom the Greeks obtained the knowledge of this wonder- 
ful tree is shown at once by the name they gave it. As phoenix 
(purple or crimson) meant the Phoenician dye, and phoenix ; phoeni- 
kion (a sort of guitar), the Phoenician instrument, so phoenix, date- 
palm, is simply the Phoenician tree (note 59), which, as the 
characteristic product, and, at the same time, symbol of that 
country, is to be found figured on the Phoenician and, later, 
Carthaginian coins struck in Sicily. The Iliad never mentions 
the palm, which was as foreign on the Anatolian coast as in 
Greece proper ; but in the oldest and most beautiful part of the 
Odyssey, the palm at Delos is described in words that express the 
admiration excited in the Greeks of the Epic period by a figure so 
novel and strange in the vegetable world. Ulysses has approached 
Nausicaa on the strand, and flatteringly beseeches her assistance : 

" Never, I never viewed till this blest hour 
Such finished grace ! I gaze, and I adore ! 
/ Thus seems the palm, with stately honours crowned 
By Phoebus' altars ; thus overlooks the ground ; 
The pride of Delos. (By the Delian coast, 
I voyaged, leader of a warrior-host ; 
But ah, how changed ! from thence my sorrow flows j 
Oh fatal voyage, sum of all my woes.) 
Raptured I stood, for earth ne'er knew to bear 
A plant so stately, or a nymph so fair. 1 ' 



THE DATE-PALM. 205 



The far-travelled Ulysses had nowhere else on earth seen a tree 
like this, to the slender form of which he compares the figure of 
the royal maiden, just as Solomon does in his Song, " This thy 
stature is like to a palm-tree," and as the daughters of kings in 
the Old Testament bear the name of Tamar, the date-palm. 
The palm-tree, the pride of Delos, is also mentioned in Homer's 
hymn to the Delian Apollo ; at its foot, clasping its stem with 
her arms, Leto was said to have given birth to her glorious son. 
The fame of the Delian palm grew with the increasing fame of 
the island, both as a resort of Apollo's pilgrims and as an 
emporium, especially because its fame had been echoed in the 
Odyssey (note 60). In later times, palm leaves were used at the 
four great festivals as symbols of victory. They were sometimes 
worn in wreaths on the head, sometimes carried in the hand. In 
explanation of this custom, tradition relates that Theseus, on his 
way home from Crete, instituted games at Delos in honour of 
Apollo, and adorned the victors with palm-branches, an example 
which was afterwards imitated. We take this to signify that not 
only the palm as an attribute of the God of Day, but also the 
palm-branch as a symbol of victory and joy, came from the Semites 
by way of Crete and Delos ; for the palm and its branches were 
used by the Semites in the same manner — witness the Jewish 
Feast of Tabernacles ; and Theseus not only personifies the deeds 
of the Attic Ionians and their voyages between Crete and Athens, 
but appears as a zealous worshipper of the Semitic Aphrodite. 
Instead of Theseus, a local legend related that the first thing seen 
by Herakles on returning from the nether-world was a palm-tree, 
with the branches of which he crowned himself. Here we cannot 
mistake the God of Day, of whom the palm, the tree of light, is an 
attribute. On that occasion the Arcadian hero Iasius, the first 
winner of a race, received the palm of victory from Herakles ; 
his statue was seen by Pausanias at Tegea, which represented him 
leading a horse with his right hand, and carrying a palm-branch 
in his left. In the middle of the seventh century B.C., the tyrant 
Kypselus, ruler of semi-oriental Corinth, dedicated a bronze palm- 
tree to the temple at Delphi, where there were no living palms. 
The frogs and watersnakes represented at the foot of this bronze 



206 THE DATE-PALM. 



tree sadly puzzled later mythologists and commentators; probably 
the artist only meant to express, in a realistic manner, that the 
palm, the child of the desert, could not live without some 
water, but preferred stagnant water — a fact which he had no 
doubt learned in Corinth. The Athenians also erected a bronze 
palm-tree at Delphi, in honour of their double victory on the 
Eurymedon, and another at Delos through Nikias. Palms 
are found figured on coins of Ephesus, of Hierapytna and 
Priansus in Crete, of Karystos in Eubcea, and on painted vases, 
as attributes of Leto and Apollo, and palm-branches as the 
reward of victory. A dithyrambus by Pindar proves that the 
Argive Nemea possessed its palm in his day. Pausanias saw 
palms growing in front of the Temple of Artemis at Aulis, which 
did not bear such fine dates as those of Palestine, but sweeter 
than those of Ionia. So, in spite of the Pythagorean prohibition 
against planting date-palms (because the use of the branch in 
sign of victory was considered impious by the sect), the tree 
gradually came to surround some of the cities and sanctuaries of 
Greece with its graceful groves, to the admiration of all who saw 
that Babylonish-Libyan wonder for the first time. 

Turning to the fortunes of the palm-tree in Sicily and Italy, 
we must first of all draw attention to the difference between the 
date-palm (Phoenix dactyliferd) and the dwarf-palm (Chamcerops 
humilts), the latter being a bluish-green bush, generally stunted in 
form, that thrives in hot places in Spain, Sicily, and South Italy, 
whose young leaves, roots, and fruit are eaten, and of whose 
fan-shaped leaves brooms are made, ropes are twined, and 
basket, mats, etc., are woven. 

In consequence of the name/^;w being common to both plants, 
the ancient references to the dwarf-palm have often been 
erroneously applied to the history of the date-palm. But Theo- 
phrastus already distinctly separates the two kinds : " The so- 
called dwarf-palms {chamairipheis, groundling)," he says, "are 
very different from the date-palms, although they bear the same 
name ; they survive the extraction of the brain (the savoury leaf- 
buds, whereas the date-palm dies when the cerebrum is taken away), 
and when they are cut down, the root sprouts again, which is not 



THE DWARF-PALM. 207 



the case with the date-palm. The fruit and leaves are also 
different ; the latter are broad and soft (not unlike those of the 
fan-palm) so that they are braided into baskets and mats (as is 
the case in the present day). Dwarf-palms are frequent in Crete, 
and still more in Sicily." Cicero relates that the sailors of 
the fleet, deserted by its commander, nourished themselves on 
the roots and sprouts of this Sicilian coast-palm. When Virgil 
speaks of palmosa Selinus he means the dwarf-palm, which still 
covers the waste coast round the ruins of ancient Selinus near 
Castelvetrano. The besoms with which the mosaic pavements 
mentioned by Horace were swept were made of the same palm, 
and so were the ropes, cords, and mats mentioned by Varro, and 
the mats with which the vines of the province Baetica were 
sheltered during the dog-days. Columella's Palma campestris is 
evidently the Chamcerops humilis, which is also alluded to in 
his regio palma facunda. The verb palmare, to tie up young 
shoots, could not have been formed either from palma, the 
palm of the hand, or from palmes, pali?iitis, but only from 
pab?ia, the dwarf-palm. Even the planta pahnarum or cephalo, 
spoken of later by Palladius as covering the dry ground that 
bears no other plant, can be no other than the Chamczrops humilts 
which is still called in Italy cefaglione (from encephalos, the edible 
young shoots). The Isle of Palmaria, now Palmarola, took its 
name from the palm-bushes with which it was once overgrown. 

Still we meet pretty early with the date-palm, the palm as a 
real tree, in Italy. It is true, when the legend relates that Rhea 
Silvia, the mother of Romulus and Remus, saw in a dream two 
palm-trees growing before the altar of Vesta, one of which shaded 
the whole earth and touched the sky with its summit, such a 
Greek legend could only have been invented when Rome was 
already powerful and victorious ; it was imitated from the vine 
that, springing from the lap of Mandane the daughter of 
Astyages, grew till it covered all Asia ; or from the olive wreath 
seen by Xerxes in a dream, which spread over all the earth. But 
even in Rome's earlier time, when the city was still small, and 
its name not far known, the tunica pahnata, adopted like other 
badges of magisterial pomp from the Etruscans, was already 



2c8 THE DATE-PALM. 



embroidered with leaf-forms taken from the Oriental date-palm. 
Palm branches, as a sign of victory in the Roman games, were 
first used in the year of the city 459 (b.c. 293) in imitation of the 
Grecian custom. From these two facts, it is true, we could not 
with certainty conclude that the date-palm actually grew in Italy 
at that time ; for the leaves used in the games might have been 
brought by ship to Italy, just as they are now furnished for Jewish 
and Christian festivals ; and the more as the leaves do not easily 
fade. But about the same period, in 291 B.C., the following miracle 
occurred in the grove of Apollo at Antium. The Romans, 
during a plague, had fetched the snake of iEsculapius from 
Epidauros, and landed it at Antium. The snake, which so far 
had willingly followed the messengers and guessed their intentions, 
now escaped from the ship, twined itself round a tall palm-tree, 
and after three days quietly returned to the* ship, which then sailed 
up the Tiber to Rome. Whatever we may think of this event, the 
existence of a palm-tree at Antium must be taken for granted as 
a point of departure ; and such existence in a busy seaport town, 
and a place where Apollo was worshipped, is not at all improbable. 
We know from Livy 24, 10, that, in b.c. 214, there were palm- 
trees in Apulia. As at Antium, so in the Greek towns of South 
Italy, date-palms no doubt adorned the beautiful coast as the 
accompaniments of sanctuaries dedicated to Apollo. Varro's 
remark, that " the palm-tree bears ripe fruit in Judaea, but not in 
Italy/' is a proof that there was no lack of palms in the Augustan 
age. But by whom was it originally introduced ? Whence came 
the non- Grecian name of palma, if the use of the victor's wreath 
and the embroidering with palm-leaves were derived from Greece ? 
The word cannot be explained from the Latin ; and indeed how 
could such an exotic have a Latin name ? Palma, we therefore 
conclude, is a corruption of the Semitic tamar, tomer (as the 
Greek tads, peacock, became pavo), or it was imitated from a 
Semitic dialect in which the first letter of the word sounded like/. 
We find an analogy to this in the Biblical Tadmor, and its Greco- 
Latin name Palmyra, where translation is quite out of the question 
(note 61). 

Preceding the Greeks, or, as we may say, slipping past them, 



THE DA TE-PALM. 209 



at a time when marine traffic was very active (as we see by the 
treaty of commerce preserved in Polybius), Tuscan or Latin 
sailors must have actually seen the palm-tree and learnt its name 
on the coasts of Libya, Sicily, and Sardinia; or, on the other hand, 
Punic merchants may have brought branches of it {termites, 
spadikes, note 62) to Italy, either as curiosities, or to adorn 
religious festivals, or as signs of homage to native princes and 
chiefs. So, too, the Etruscans may have become acquainted with 
the palm and its uses direct from the Carthaginians without the 
intervention of the Greeks. As we have before remarked, there 
was in those early times no question as yet of importing the fruit 
of the date-palm as an article of trade. The word dactylus, 
borrowed from Semitic, and having nothing to do with finger any 
more than palma has to do with hand, is only met with very late, 
in the time of the Anton ines ; but it spread through all the Latin 
languages (Ital. dattero, Span, daiil, Fr. datte), and from these to 
the Teutonic tongues. There is another and older name, caryota, 
caryotis, which, first applied to a peculiar nut-shaped date, was 
frequently used in the first century of the empire. Poets also 
used the word palma for the fruit. But these expressions were 
afterwards lost, and date became the name generally used in the 
commercial language of Western Europe. 

It is very easy to rear and propagate the date-palm, for the 
stone soon sprouts when buried in the earth. If the tree bore 
fruit in Europe as it does in Africa, there would soon be murmur- 
ing palm-groves on all the European peninsulas that stretch into 
the Mediterranean Sea; care would have been taken in those 
early days to plant trees of both sexes near together, and the 
Oriental method of artificially assisting the natural fructification 
would have been resorted to. On the downfall of the ancient 
world, when barbarism overwhelmed those regions, and the sense 
of grace in life was extinguished, the palm-trees that had survived 
antiquity gradually died out ; they were unprofitable, and in those 
days a coarse and greedy self-interest was the only thing that 
swayed men's minds, besides self-torment and a longing for the 
other world. But the palm reappeared wherever Arabs settled 
on the Mediterranean coast. In Spain, about the year a.d. 756, 

14 



2io THE DATE-PALM. 



the Caliph Abdurrahman I. planted with Lis own hand the first 
date-palm in a garden near Cordova, from which tree all the 
other palms in modern Spain are descended. The caliph often re- 
garded this tree with a longing remembrance of the Arabian home 
from which both caliph and tree were so far away. Palm-trees 
were also planted by the Saracens in Sicily and Calabria, but this 
Orientalism on European soil had but a short existence. A few 
stray specimens of the tree had remained down to modern times, 
as if by accident, to the joy and admiration of northern travellers, 
whose enthusiasm first drew the attention of the inhabitants to 
the picturesqueness and beauty of the tree. Meanwhile, in this 
as in so many other cases, the Christian Church had faithfully 
retained the imagery of heathenism and Judaism, and the same 
branch which had figured at the feast of Osiris in Egypt, which 
was used at the solemn entry of kings and heroes into Jerusalem, 
which was worn as a badge of victory at the Olympic games, and 
embroidered on the garments of Roman emperors, was now 
consecrated at Rome on Palm Sunday by the Head of Christen- 
dom, and distributed to all the churches of the eternal city. 
This custom led to the planting of the largest palm-grove pos- 
sessed by modern Italy, that of Bordighera on the glorious 
coast-road from Genoa to Nice, between San Remo and Venti- 
miglia, almost under the 44th degree of north latitude. For some 
centuries (it is said since the erection of the obelisk in St. 
Peter's Square), the inhabitants of Bordighera have enjoyed the 
privilege of supplying Rome with palm-branches at Eastertide, 
and this industry gradually led to the planting of more than four 
thousand trees, which occupy many miles of country. The 
manner of producing the more expensive and much-prized white 
palms is this. From about the middle of summer the leaves of 
the tree are bound together in a bunch, so that the inner ones, 
deprived of light, can generate no chlorophyll, and thus in their 
whiteness become not only a symbol of victory, like the green 
leaves, but of heavenly purity, a thoroughly Christian thought, 
which never occurred to the ancients. A traveller passing 
through the Riviera di Ponente at Midsummer, sees the palms 
rearing their heads in the shape of gigantic tulips, and does not 



THE DATE-PALM. 



understand at first what such a mutilation of the beautiful tree 
can mean. From Bordighera, specimens of the palm have been 
propagated here and there along the whole coast ; at Rome the 
palm-tree in front of St. Pietro in vinculis is a model for painters 
of Bible scenes ; whoever has visited the island of Capri has not 
failed to notice the palm-tree in the garden of the hotel Pagano ; 
and in the Villa Nazionale of Naples there are a few fine trees, 
which, on dark summer nights, touched by the pale light from 
the flaring gas-lamps, hover like ghosts above the heads of the 
moving crowd below. The tree is seen more frequently in the 
still milder climates of Calabria, Sicily, and Sardinia. It is said 
that whole groves of date-palms used to flourish in the vicinity 
of Reggio, but they were either destroyed by the Arabs them- 
selves when expelled from that coast, or were uprooted by the 
Christians as relics of those unbelievers. It is also related, that 
the kings of the House of Anjou, when attempting to reconquer 
Sicily during the fourteenth century, caused a whole forest of 
palms south of Palermo to be rooted up. At Elche, in Spain, 
to the south-west of Alicant, and near the border of hot Murcia, 
between 39 and 40 N. latitude, stands a celebrated palm-forest 
of 60,000 trees, which not only produce leaves for pious pilgrims, 
but luscious fruit for boys and girls. The Arabs were conquered, 
the Moriscoes exterminated or driven away ; the wood of Elche, 
originally planted by unbelieving hands, remained as a sign of 
weakness of faith even among the disciples of Loyola. In the 
uttermost West, on the Isles of the Blest, in mid-ocean, the first 
explorers found fruitful date-palms ; at least Pliny has preserved 
a statement to that effect by the Numidian king Juba. Is it 
possible that the sea had carried date-stones from distant Africa 
to the shores of the Canaries? In the opposite direction the 
early Arabs had profitably cultivated the date-palm even on the 
southern shore of the Caspian Sea, so that in this quarter the 
cold realm of the Russians has pushed its frontier almost to the 
sub-tropical zone of the date-palm ; and if only a few unfruitful 
specimens now survive, Von Baer is inclined to ascribe it rather 
to the climate having cooled down than to the indolence of the 
present inhabitants. 



THE CYPRESS. 

(CUPRESSUS SEMPERVIRENS.) 

Humboldt, in his " Kosmos," tells us that the native home of 
the cypress is the mountains of Busih, west of Herat. Ritter, 
speaking of the Asiatic distribution of the cypress, agrees that 
the true home of the mountain cypress lies to the west of the 
valley of the Indus, in the tablelands of Caboul and Afghanistan, 
and particularly the above-named Busih, Bushank, or Fusheng, 
where the tree attains an enormous height. From this home the 
cypress migrated westward in company with the Iranian worship 
of the sun. The Zends saw in the slender, heavenward-aspiring, 
obelisk shape of the tree the image of the sacred flame. Accord- 
ing to the Shah Nameh the tree came from Paradise. Zoroaster 
himself had first planted it on earth; it bore witness to the truth 
of Ormuzd and the purity of his word ; and all over Iran, vener- 
able specimens of it adorned the temples of fire, the courts of 
palaces, and the centre of the Medo-Persian shrubberies or para- 
dises. Following the path of the oldest Assyrio-Babylonian 
migrations, the cypress very early arrived in the countries of the 
Aramaeo-Canaanite tribes, the Lebanon, and the Island of Cyprus, 
which took its name from the tree (note 63); and there, too, 
became a holy tree, in which a goddess of nature was present ; 
the same shown to us in the Troad by Virgil, who describes 
her ancient deserted temple with the sacred cypress, in this case 
calling the deity Ceres, while in another he calls her Diana. 

The practical value placed on the cypress by the Phoenicians, 
and which it continued to enjoy among the Greeks and Romans, 
was intermixed in a remarkable manner with its religious signifi- 



THE CYPRESS. 213 



cance. The wood of the cypress, scented and hard, and exhaling 
an agreeable odour when burnt, was considered both imperishable 
and indestructible. The land-lots of the citizens were ordered to 
be inscribed upon tablets of cypress-wood, and deposited in the 
temples to endure for posterity. Theophrastus speaks of cypress- 
wood as lasting longer than many other hard woods, such as 
cedar, etc. The timber of the cypress was preferred to all other 
kinds for building the Phoenician ships. Like Noah's ark, the 
Euphrates fleet of Alexander the Great was built of cypress-wood, 
which noble material he partly obtained in ready-hewn pieces 
from Phoenicia and Cyprus ; and Antigonus caused the splendid 
cypresses and cedars of Lebanon to be felled for constructing his 
fleet against the allied generals. Cypress-wood was used to make 
costly chests : for example, those in the temple of Diana at Ephe- 
sus ; it was employed for coffins as an extremely durable material. 
At the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, when there was public 
interment of those who had fallen for their country, their remains 
were enclosed in shrines of cypress-wood, on which occasion 
Pericles pronounced his celebrated oration in praise of Athens. 
On Hiero II. 's splendid grain-ship already mentioned, that " Great 
Eastern " of antiquity, whose chief architect was Archimedes, the 
walls and roof of the Aphrodisium were constructed of cypress, 
and the doors of ivory and ebony. But cypress-wood, sweet- 
scented and incorruptible, was chiefly used for making idols, of 
which there was an incredible number in all the Grecian temples. 
As Jupiter's sceptre was imagined to be of that material, it was 
also considered particularly suitable for xoana^ i.e., wooden 
images (together with ebony, cedar, oak, yew, and lotus-wood). 
The comic poet, Hermippus, who flourished at the beginning of 
the Peloponnesian war, in a remarkable passage describing the 
trade of the Mediterranean, mentions Cretan cypress-wood as 
being brought by sea to Athens for making statues of the gods ; 
and Xenophon relates how, on returning from Asia, he founded 
a small temple at Olympia to the Ephesian Artemis, and placed 
in it a statue of the goddess made of cypress-wood. The oldest 
statue of an athlete seen by Pausanias at Olympia was likewise 
made of cypress-wood, and was in better preservation than a 



214 THE CYPRESS. 



newer one made of fig- wood. It is the same thing in Italy. Pliny 
speaks of a very ancient idol, representing Vejovis, on the arx in 
Rome, made of cypress ; and Livy relates that in b.c. 207, two 
cypress figures of Juno Regina were carried in solemn procession 
to the temple of that goddess on the Aventine. All precious 
things that were to be preserved from worms and insects, such as 
manuscripts, etc., were enclosed in boxes of cypress-wood. 

No wonder, then, that the tree which yielded this wood, and 
was so highly venerated, should have been propagated by the 
Phoenicians and Philistines, wherever they settled and the climate 
was favourable, from the very earliest times. In Crete, that early 
Semitic island, the tree flourished so well and grew so high on the 
mountains, that the island came to be considered its original 
home. In Homer's Catalogue of Ships he mentions places in 
continental Greece whose names are taken from the cypress ; one 
on Mount Parnassus in Phocis, the other in Triphylia, in the 
kingdom of Nestor. On the coast of Laconia, an early scene of 
Phoenician influence, there was a seaport town Cyparissia, and a 
place in Messenia had the same, or a similar name, while in both 
towns a goddess, Athena Cyparissia, was worshipped, whom we 
may presume to have been a Semitic deity under a Greek name. 
If we roam through later Greece in company with Pausanias, we 
find here and there cypress groves, in which — what is notable — 
deities of Asiatic origin were chiefly worshipped ; for example, 
Ganymeda, in the Acropolis of Phlius, a goddess otherwise called 
Dia, the breaker of chains ; liberated prisoners hung up their fet- 
ters on the cypresses near her temple ; or Bellerophontes and 
Aphrodite Melainis, whose temples stood in a cypress grove near 
Corinth ; or the heaven-high cypresses at Psophis in Arcadia, that 
grew beside Alcmaeon's grave, and were called Virgins by the 
inhabitants, who never dared to touch them (note 64). 

The Greek word for cypress, kuparissos (in early Hebrew, gopher ^ 
see Genesis vi. 14), puts it beyond all doubt that the tree migrated 
to Greece from Semitic countries. As frequently happened, 
Crete perhaps formed the intermediate station ; at least the legend 
of the transformation of Cyparissus into a cypress-tree, points to 
such a thing. According to that legend, Cyparissus was a Cretan 



THE CYPRESS. 215 



youth beloved by Apollo or Zephyr ; to preserve his chastity he 
fled to the river Orontes and to Mount Casius (the throne of Baal, 
God of Heaven, who was anciently worshipped by both the Ara- 
maeans and Philistaeans), and was there transformed into the tree 
which took his name. As for the time when the cypress was intro- 
duced into Greece, it must of course have been before the founda- 
tion of the cities mentioned in the Iliad which bore its name. 

In the oldest and most genuine part of the Odyssey, the fra- 
grant cypress grows in the park around Calypso's cave — 

" Poplars and alders ever quivering play'd, 
And nodding cypress form'd a fragrant shade." 

And in the second part of the poem, the scene of which is laid in 
Ithaca, cypress-wood at least is mentioned as building material, 
whether brought from a distance or found on the spot. Ulysses, 
disguised as a beggar, leans against the cypress door-post of his 
palace. In the more limited circle of Hesiod's poems, the cypress- 
tree is never mentioned. 

The cypress being no fruit-tree (for which reason chatterers 
were likened to it), and its religious significance not greatly ex- 
tended among the Greeks, its introduction to Italy can scarcely 
have been accomplished during the first Greek colonization of the 
country. Though Pliny speaks once of a cypress as old as the 
city itself, existing at Rome in Nero's time, in another place he 
more credibly informs us that the tree was foreign to Italy, and 
difficult to acclimatize. In the idyls of Theocritus, the scenes of 
which are laid in Sicily, we find the cypress frequently mentioned 
with praise. From Sicily the tree seems to have spread to the 
interior of Italy by way of Tarentum, for Cato calls it the Taren- 
tine cypress. This may have been after the subjugation of Taren- 
tum, when the influence of the Greek town made itself felt by 
the Roman conquerors, who gradually acquired a taste for villas, 
parks, monuments, and fine trees. The beauty and utility of the 
wood as material for wood- carvers and cabinet-makers were soon 
realized by the practical Romans, as is proved by Pliny's statement 
that the ancients called a cypress plantation their daughter's 
dowry. The trees planted at her birth grew up with the child, 



216 THE CYPRESS. 



at once a living capital, and her image and emblem (note 65). 
Rows of cypresses, as well as other trees, were used to mark out 
boundaries of property. When the Roman Empire embraced both 
Africa and Asia, the gloomy evergreen cypress also was in Oriental 
fashion extensively planted as the symbol of the Chthonian or 
subterranean deities, at first of course among the upper classes, 
who soon adopted the mystic language of signs peculiar to the 
East. The poets of the Augustan age regarded the cypress as 
the symbol of mourning, and frequently use it in that sense. 
From that time the splendid tree became naturalized in Italy, and, 
together with the pine, it forms the characteristic vegetation of 
South-European scenery. Where the cypress begins, there also 
begins the realm of forms, the ideal style ; there we are on classic 
ground. Nevertheless, true cypress-groves, cupresseta, are not to 
be found in Italy ; the tree generally stands solitary, or in small 
groups, or stretches away in a colonnade at once gloomy and 
graceful. Cypresses are as frequent in the valley of the Arno as 
pines in the Campagna Felice near Naples. The cypress never 
crosses the Alps, and however tall and slender some few speci- 
mens may be in Italy, for example in the Villa Este at Tivoli, it 
never attains such majesty as in its native East, where, as Ritter 
says, "imperishable, evergreen, and balmy groves of these pyra- 
midal forms " spread their clear twilight over the white tombs of 
the faithful, and awaken a feeling of aspiring, inexhaustible, ever- 
renewed life, even in the presence of the dead. 

A variety of the pyramidal cypress, the Cupressus horizontalis, 
with branches spreading sideways instead of upwards, is very rare 
in Italy and Greece, but is frequently met with in the warmer 
regions of Asia Minor. 



THE r LANE-TREE. 

(PLATAN US ORIENTALIS.) 

The fame of the plane-tree fills all antiquity, east and west, and is 
still echoed in the descriptions of ancient and modern travellers. 
What can be more beautiful amid the sterile rocks of southern 
lands, or what can turn the mind to greater reverence and 
admiration than one of these magnificent trees, with its bright 
foliage, its green-grey trunk, and its deeply-dented leaves, waving its 
ample boughs above some clear spring or purling brook ? What 
sight can be more delightful than, standing on some sunburnt 
mountain top, to look down upon a group of plane-trees, certain 
to find beneath them shade and a cool spring, where the traveller 
may let loose and water his tired animal, quench his thirst, and 
repose his limbs ? With what ecstasy Plato makes his Socrates 
describe the plane-tree, near Athens, under which he lies down to 
chat with Phsedrus ; the ice-cold water at their feet, the scented 
blossoms overhead, the cooling breeze, the song of the cicadas, the 
velvet turf — in words of such sweet fulness, that the far-fetched 
compliment paid them by Cicero falls altogether flat ; namely, 
that " the tree seems to have grown out of Plato's language rather 
than out of the brook he describes." 

Venerable plane-trees of immense height and great age are still 
found here and there in Asia Minor and the Greek peninsula, 
though these countries have been so denuded of forest by the 
hand of man. Celebrated far and near is the immense plane-tree 
of Vostizza, the ancient Aigion in Achaia, the trunk of which, 
about three feet above the ground, measures more than forty feet 
in circumference. The tree still possesses its noble crown of 



218 THE PLANE-TREE. 



leaves, and would perhaps live for centuries to come, if the partly 
hollow trunk had not been used as a kitchen during the Revolution, 
and the tree itself half consumed by fire. Every one who has been 
to Constantinople has seen the plane-trees of Buyukdere, called 
the Seven Brothers, hollowed by age and the fires of shepherds, 
yet still splendid and majestic. Near the temple of Apollo, at 
Bassa?, Stackelberg saw a. plane-tree forty-eight feet in circumfer- 
ence, with its hollow stem turned into a sheep-fold. The author of 
"East and West," speaking of Stanchio in the Isle of Cos, says: 
" In front of the mosque stands a very ancient and magnificent 
plane-tree, thirty feet in. circumference, surrounded and supported 
by antique marble and granite pillars, for which no more beautiful 
place of rest could be imagined." Prince Piickler said of the same 
tree : " My first walk was to the celebrated plane-tree, said to be 
the largest of the kind in the East. Its trunk only measures 
thirty-five feet in circumference, but its boughs cover the whole of 
the market-place of Stanchio. It is supported by marble columns, 
which were taken long ago from the temple of iEsculapius, and 
the tops of which are nearly all imbedded in the bark of the 
immense boughs, so that they are completely amalgamated with 
the tree. Two sarcophagi lying at the foot are used as water- 
troughs." 

Near the cave-monastery of Megaspelaeon in the Arcadian 
mountains stands the plane-tree on which St. Luke painted the 
miraculous picture of the Virgin ; " within its hollow, but still living 
trunk,'' says Ulrichs, " is the little chapel of the Panagia Platanio- 
tissa, roomy enough to hold ten persons." Mr. Dodwell, in his 
"Classical and Topographical Tour through Greece," says that the 
bazaars and market-places of most Greek towns are shaded by 
plane-trees, just as the Agora of Athens was planted by Cimon 
with trees of the same species. Some trees were so old and large 
that they were already the admiration of the ancients, for 
Theophrastus tells of a plane-tree near the aqueduct in the 
Lyceum at Athens, which, though young, had thrown out roots 
about twenty-five yards long. At Pharae in Achaia, Pausanias saw 
plane-trees, on the banks of the river Pieros, of such dimensions 
that their hollow trunks could be used as a banqueting-hall or 



THE PLANE-TREE. 219 



sleeping-chamber j and at Kaphyae in Arcadia he saw the tall and 
splendid Menelai's, that is, the plane-tree of Menelaus, which the 
inhabitants said had been planted by that hero before he de- 
parted for Troy. Theophrastus thinks this tree was planted by 
Agamemnon, to whom also the plane-tree near the Castalian 
spring at Delphi is attributed. If we add to these the plane-tree 
of Helen mentioned by Theocritus, we see that legend loves to 
link this tree (which, as one of shade and enjoyment, always 
belongs to kings, and to the high and mighty in general) specially 
with the House of Pelops, as the line of rulers par excellence. In 
the Iliad, when the heroes, led by the Pelopidse, prepare to depart 
from Aulis, they sacrifice beside a spring at the foot of a plane-tree, 
and in its boughs see the sign which Calchas interprets as signifying 
that the war will last ten years. The tree had been introduced 
into Greece from Asia, where the plane-tree, like the cypress, had 
for ages been an object of religious veneration to the tree-loving 
Iranians, and the West-Iranian races of Asia Minor. Herodotus 
has preserved for us a beautiful episode in the war undertaken by 
Xerxes against the Greeks. While on his way to Sardis in Lydia, 
the king saw a plane-tree, which so took his fancy that he adorned 
its branches with golden bracelets and chains, as a lover does his 
mistress, and set a watchman to guard it. Hamilton, travelling in 
that region, found the half-decayed trunk of the most gigantic 
plane-tree he had ever seen, and imagined it might be the very one 
admired by Xerxes. There also used to be shown the tall plane- 
tree on which Apollo hung his unfortunate rival Marsyas. Pliny 
describes one of the largest plane-trees as growing in Lycia, where 
it was no doubt sanctified by legend. It stood, as is always the 
case, near a spring, and the hollow in its trunk measured eighty-one 
feet, though the crown was still so verdant that it. formed a roof 
impenetrable to the rays of the sun. The Roman consul Licinius 
Mutianus, who dined with eighteen guests in the hollow of this 
plane-tree, confessed that it was more beautiful than any of the 
gilded and marble halls of Rome. Homer only mentions the 
plane-tree once, and the passage is perhaps a later insertion, for the 
author of the splendid description of the poplar-shaded spring 
in Ithaca (Od. 17, 204) can scarcely have been acquainted with 



22o THE PLANE-TREE. 



the plane-tree. After Homer, we find the first notice of the 
plane-tree in the writings of Theognis, who mentions a grove of 
plane-trees in Laconia, standing near the cold spring from which 
the vine-dresser watered his vines. The plane-tree is not a native 
of Semitic countries, and could not therefore have been introduced 
into Greece by the Phoenicians. It is true that there was a 
supposed evergreen plane-tree at Gortyna in Crete, under which 
Jupiter was united to Europa ; but the Phoenician cult of Europa 
at Gortyna must have been largely penetrated by Lycian and 
Carian elements. The plane-tree was held sacred by the Carians 
as well as the Syrians ; Herodotus informs us that near Labraynda 
there was a sacred grove of plane-trees dedicated to the native 
Zeus Stratios, into which the Carians withdrew when beaten by the 
Persians (an Iranian feature in the otherwise Semitic character of 
the Carian religion). 

Probably the true home of the plane-tree is the mountain 
ranges of the steppes of Western Asia, where the tree grows on 
the Taurus at a height of 5,000 feet above the sea. The Greek 
name of the tree, platanistos, platanos, proves that it came from a 
Phrygian, Lycian, or some other Iranian source, and not from the 
Semites ; to a Phoenician product its Phoenician name would 
have adhered; but platanistos — the broad-leaved, the widely 
shading— was either formed within the Greek language itself 
(platys, broad, etc.), or, what seems more probable, it had a 
similar sound in the kindred Iranic idiom (Zendic frath, to 
spread, perethu, broad ; and even the later Persic names of the 
tree, dulb, dulbar, and tchindr, tchandl have passed into the 
modern Semitic languages, showing their obligations to Iranian 
culture in this matter). A beautiful picture of the Oriental plane- 
tree is to be found in the edition of Marco Polo by H. Yule, 
London, 1871. 

On the extension of the plane-tree to the west of Europe, we 
have the weighty evidence of Theophrastus : " The plane-tree is 
said not to exist in the regions about the Adriatic Sea, except 
round the temple of Diomed (on Diomed's Isle, now one of the 
Tremiti group, north of the Garganus promontory). It is said to 
be rare in Italy, although that country is not wanting in water ; at 



THE PLANE-TREE. 



least the plane-trees planted by the elder Dionysius in his garden 
at Rhegium, which now stand in the gymnasium, do not thrive in 
spite of the utmost care." Pliny repeats all this, adding that the 
plane-tree was first planted on the grave of Diomed in the island 
called after that hero, then in Sicily, and was very early intro- 
duced into Italy. With the Roman nobility of the last days of 
the Republic it was a fashionable pastime to plant plane-trees 
amongst other expensive adornments of villas and gardens, while 
the common people preferred to plant fruit-trees, from which they 
could gather a crop. Fond of exclusive luxury, the aristocracy 
were pleased with the superstition that it was better to nourish 
the roots of the plane-tree with wine than with water ; thus it is 
related of the celebrated orator Hortensius, that he once requested 
Cicero to take his turn in pleading at court, because he was 
obliged to go to his villa at Tusculum, in order with his own 
hands to moisten the roots of his plane-tree with wine. The 
great Caesar, we are told in one of Martial's hymns, planted a 
plane-tree on the bank of the Guadalquivir ; the growth of this 
tree, in the eyes of the poet, was an image of the imperishable 
glory of the Dictator and his house. In the Augustan poets, 
those hangers-on of the court, it is a favourite habit to sit in the 
thick shade of this aristocratic tree beside some cooling spring, 
and give themselves up to the enjoyment of repose and wine. 
Ovid calls the plane-tree genialis — that is, a tree that serves to- 
nourish genius and heighten the enjoyment of life. But again, in 
true Roman fashion, conscience wakes up and protests against 
desecrating the holy ground, the teeming Earth, by planting a 
mere ornamental tree that does no one any good, much as chil- 
dren are forbidden to play with bread. Hence the epithets, 
"lonely, barren, bachelor," applied to it. "Soon," says Horace, 
"the fishponds will be bigger than the Lucrine Lake, and the 
bachelor plane drive out the elm," — the latter being a wedded 
tree, for it supports the vine. " Who," asks Pliny, " would believe 
a tree had been fetched from the other end of the world for the 
sake of shade ? Why, the plane has got as far as the Morini ; it 
takes up some of their tributary soil, and they pay a tax for its 
shadow." It is hardly credible that the true plane-tree, the Platanus 



222 THE PLANE-TREE. 

orientalise was planted on the Straits of Dover, and flourished 
there ; it must have been a similar shady tree, perhaps the 
northern maple, Acer platanoides, called by Pliny himself the 
Gallic or white maple, for which tree there is a remarkably similar 
name running through the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, and Thracian 
languages (note 66). It is generally believed that the American 
maple {platanus Occidentalis), which is now largely used in Central 
Europe for forming avenues, was brought from a still greater 
distance than the plane-tree of the ancients, and equally for the 
sake of its shade alone. Some consider it a mere variety of the 
Oriental plane-tree, but the first opinion is by far the most probable. 



THE PINE TREE. 

(PINUS PINEA.) 

The history of the Pine-tree is beset with difficulties, because the 
ancients, in mentioning the coniferous trees, do not carefully dis- 
tinguish the various kinds, and have thus left a wide field open to 
conjecture. However, two groups of these trees can be distin- 
guished with sufficient certainty: one, called "elate," is the pinus 
picea; the other has the two names of "pitys" and "peuke," 
under which must be included the Pine, if it occurs at all. Homer 
was acquainted with all three names : his " elate " is a tall aspiring 
tree, with the epithets lofty, towering, heaven-high, therefore the 
Fir; but that his "pitys" meant the Pine, pinus pinea, the tree 
with the elegant parasol-like roof and edible almond-like kernels, 
is by no means clear from the three, or rather two, passages in 
which the word occurs. In the Iliad we read : 

" Then, as the mountain oak, or poplar tall, 
Or pine (fit mast for some great admiral), 
Nods to the axe till, with a groaning sound, 
It sinks, and spreads its honours on the ground : 
Thus fell the king." 

But here the adjective blothros (up-shooting), and the association 
with oak and poplar, leads more naturally to the larch-fir, Pinus 
laricio, or to the Pinus pzcea, elsewhere called " elate," than to the 
nut-bearing pine ; thus Ulysses on Calypso's Isle builds his ship 
of elm, poplar, and fir (elate). And the same remarks apply to 
the second passage. As for " pitys " and " peuke, " the funda- 
mental meaning of both is that of pitch-tree, resin-tree. The 
different names may have been used in different localities for the 



224 THE PINE-TREE. 

same species, or vice versa, the same name for different kinds. 
Theophrastus says that what he called " peuke " the Arcadians 
called " pitys." Position, soil, climate, and age certainly produced 
varieties of the tree in those times as well as later. The detailed 
descriptions by Theophrastus in his " History of Plants " are not 
sufficiently clear to make a fixed terminology of the coniferse 
possible in our sense of the word ; and there is nothing to show 
whether the cultivated pine had its wild representatives in the 
Grecian mountains, or whether it was a foreign tree, and, in the 
latter case, whence it had come, and when. 

If we turn for information to the fruit of the pine, we find that 
the name for the nuts in the cone was at first a general one, used 
for all kinds of pips and berries ; but in later times it was confined 
to pine-kernels. In an Attic inscription, which perhaps belongs to 
the second century B.C., pine-cones are mentioned among other 
dainties, but we are not informed whether they grew in Greece or 
came from abroad, like dates and Egyptian beans. From these 
and other testimonies too complicated to mention here, it results 
that as we approach nearer to modern times the pine acquires 
a more distinct form ; general names becomes more and more 
limited to this fruit, and the latter appears more frequently as a 
delicacy of common life. The comic poets of Athens never men- 
tion the pignoli) or pine-nuts. Theocritus speaks of pine-nuts as 
being a favourite dainty in Sicily ; he describes a pleasant resting- 
place, where fountains spring, birds twitter, the trees spread a cool 
shade, and the pines drop their nuts ; and, in fact, when the cone 
has hung four years on the tree, the scales open naturally and 
allow the nuts to fall out, which then only require to be cracked 
open. Cato speaks of the pine in continental Italy, giving in- 
structions how to sow the kernels. Pliny begins his enumeration 
of tree-fruits with four sorts of edible cone-kernels, belonging to 
four different kinds of trees, among which are the Picea sativa, and 
the pinaster or wild pine, the nuts of which the Taurini boiled 
with honey, and called the mixture aquicelos. When the younger 
Pliny, in his celebrated second letter to Tacitus, compares the 
smoke issuing from Vesuvius to aflinus, we at once recognise our 
pine with its umbrella-like crown resting on a tall and slender 



NUT-PINE. 225 



shaft. The pine is not forgotten by the poets in their descriptions 
of rural paradises ; it was not a forest, but a garden tree, therefore 
most certainly of foreign origin : pinus in hortis (Virgil), culta pinus 
(Ovid). Petronius uses words that distinctly paints its bare, 
tapering trunk, and its rocking, rustling roof. Martial warns the 
traveller not to rest beneath a pine-tree, lest its heavy cones fall 
upon his head. The pine-tree neither climbs high mountains nor 
wanders far from the promontories and shores of the Mediterranean 
Sea • another proof that it was foreign to both Italy and Greece, 
for the indigenous growths of those countries, where the cutting 
north wind is still felt, have strength enough, when assisted by 
cultivation, to surmount the Alps and find a footing in favourable 
localities of Central Europe. But even the neighbourhood of 
Turin is already too cold for the pine-tree. We do not know 
whether and in what part of Asia it may still be found in a wild 
state. Fiedler says it is rarely found in modern Greece, and then 
generally in solitary examples. The pine-nuts sold in the large 
bazaars usually come from Russia, and are the fruit of the Pinus 
cembra. According to Grisebach, the pine, mixed with larches, 
grows in forests on the northern shore of the peninsula of Hagion- 
Oros (which terminates in Mount Athos). In modern Italy the 
pine-tree forms the picturesque adornment of most villas and 
gardens, for example, in Rome. It has lately been extensively 
planted in the rich Campagna of Naples, above which, far and 
wide, rise its charming mushroom-shaped crowns of tufted 
branches. Now and then it is met with in denser groups, but 
nowhere so continuous as in the celebrated Pineta of Ravenna. 
This famous pine-forest to which Ravenna, though surrounded by 
marshes, owes its salubrious air, stretches for more than six geogra- 
phical miles along the shore, with a breadth of about a league, stand- 
ing on a former sea-bottom. It is well described by Karl Witte : 
" Instead of the uniformity of a swaying baldachin, in which 
form we are accustomed to see the pine, we here find many 
hundreds of grand old trees with the strangest and most curiously 
twisted branches ; and below their verdant roof a luxuriant growth 
of shrubs and creepers covers the damp and fertile ground in 
wonderful variety. An author of the last century counted almost 

i5 



226 THE PINE-TREE. 



three hundred kinds of plants in this Pineta ; and amongst them 
sing and chirp and buzz innumerable birds and other winged 
creatures ; while, far above, the breeze from the neighbouring sea 
whispers unceasingly through the branches of the pines." This 
Pineta annually yields about nine thousand bushels of pine- 
kernels, while the empty resinous cones afford the best material 
for hearth-fires. Now, as this forest for the greater part stands 
upon newly formed land, which was still sea at the time of the 
Romans, it can only have been planted during the Middle Ages, 
certainly not before the time of Procopius. But the whole ter- 
ritory was no doubt rich in pines at an earlier time. Faenza, 
not far from Ravenna, possessed cultivated pines, which towered 
above the sown fields, in the days of Silius Italicus. We do not, 
however, believe that Augustus chose Ravenna as one of the two 
stations for his fleet because of the existence of this tree, for a 
naval station and a dockyard are two very different things, the choice 
of the former depending on military and political reasons. At 
the time of the Gothic invasion there already existed a place 
called Pineta, near Ravenna, which however seems to have been 
situated to the north-west of that city, not where the modern pine 
forest stands. The latter was planted to protect Ravenna against 
the encroachments of the sea, at a time when the whole of North 
Italy was engaged in a struggle against nature by means of canals, 
dams, and other marvels of technical skill. Dante saw the forest 
and admired it ; he calls it that of Chiassi (dassis, i.e., the old 
harbour of Ravenna), and Boccaccio does the same. It was once 
the property of several churches and monasteries, and afterwards, 
until Italy was united, formed one of the estates of the Apostolic 
exchequer; the latter, in the year i860, ceded it by treaty, or 
the semblance of a treaty, to the canons of St. John Lateran, who 
in their turn transferred their rights to a private person. Both 
contracts were declared null and void by the Italian courts, 
because the sovereignty of Italy having changed, the papal 
exchequer could no longer be regarded as a proprietor. How- 
ever, the Italian Government condescended to sign an agreement, 
by virtue of which, for a relatively moderate sum, it took posses- 
sion of the Pineta, the capital of which is valued at four to five 



NUT-PINE. 227 



million francs. The citizens of Ravenna, according to an ancient 
custom, have still extensive rights of use in the forest, and it has 
been complained that the easy means of livelihood it affords 
encourages idleness and attracts all sorts of vagabonds from far 
and near. Notwithstanding, the Pineta is still considered the 
palladium of Ravenna, shielding the city and the district from 
poisonous exhalations and the tides of the sea, and is valued and 
cherished accordingly. 



THE CANE. 

(arundo donax.) 

It is a surprise to the northern traveller when, after crossing the 
Alps, he first comes in sight of a waving, rustling cane-field, the 
knotty hollow tubes of which, clothed with leaves, are often an 
inch thick or even more, and reach far above his head. The root 
bulbs, the oculi of the ancients, are laid in deep trenches, in damp 
fat soil, alongside the dams, on the banks of rivers and canals, 
but also sometimes in dry fields ; in autumn the canes which have 
sprung up are cut short, and the stumps remaining are burnt, the 
ashes being left to manure the earth for the new growth of the 
following year. One may frequently see from elevated points — 
for example during an evening walk on one of the Seven Hills of 
Rome — fire and smoke flickering and wreathing above the level 
plains. This giant grass is not only a substitute for fire-wood in 
the forestless south, but is used to prop vines, to hedge fields and 
gardens, to form arbours, railings, and the frame-work of plaster 
ceilings ; the canes serve instead of ropes for hanging wet linen 
on to dry ; they are made into fishing-rods, into weaving-spools, 
and a hundred other objects. In modern as in ancient times the 
shepherdess uses a piece of cane for a spindle, which is light and 
easy to carry as she follows her kids and lambs up the rocky path; 
and the shepherd boy, now as then, cuts from the smooth cane 
his shrilly pipe, the tibia, fistula, or syrinx. Southern people no 
longer write with a reed, but an inkstand is still called calamajo, 
as the magnet is called calamita, and the crisping-pin calamistro, 
and boys ride about on a long cane just as they did in the days 
of Horace. This cultivated plant, which must not be mistaken 



CANE. 229 



for the European marsh reed, Phragmites communis, originated in 

warmer Asia, and even now never leaves the neighbourhood of 

the Mediterranean. Already in the Homeric age the Phoenicians 

brought to Italy many articles made of the Arundo donax. As 

we infer from several words that occur in the language of the 

Epics, the word kanne, originally kane, which was derived from 

the Semitic, and which the Romans borrowed from the Greeks 

(canna, formerly carta, as is proved by canalis), produced the 

Homeric kaneon, kaneion, bread-basket, and kanon, weaver's spool, 

also the cross-bar of a shield, which served either to secure the 

handle or to stretch the shield itself. The basket, found also 

later in the extended form, kanastron, kanistron, out of which 

bread was served to the guests, was woven of split canes, and 

therefore probably an article of Phoenician trade. The kanones of 

a shield had to be both light and strong, and these two leading 

qualities of a good shield were found united in the Asiatic cane. 

The balance used by the ancient merchants when they spread 

out their wares on the seashore was no doubt an evenly poised 

cane (note 67); a straight cane formed the measure and the ruler, 

for we find kanon afterwards used in both these senses [even now 

the populace of Naples prefer to measure by the canna rather 

than by the metre]. 

The Cyclopean walls of Mycenae were hewn with chisel and 
measured with a phoinix kanon (reddened cord), which, drawn 
tight and snapped, left a straight red line on the stone. We 
very early read (in a fragment by Hipponax) of mats and covers 
made from the kanna. That Greek word is rarely found in 
antiquity, and when it is, means not the plant itself, but some 
object made out of it. We must therefore inquire when the cane 
was brought to Greece, and to what extent it was planted there. 
The reedy thicket in the Odyssey, in which Menelaus and Ulysses 
lay in ambush, may have consisted of the common marsh-reed ; 
but the arrow with which Paris wounded Eurypylus in the thigh 
must have been made of the Asiatic cane, for in this case the shaft 
had to be both strong and light ; these arrows, however, may have 
been an imported article, and of foreign material. The careful 
description given by Theophrastus of the different kinds of canes 



230 THE CANE. 



is not precise enough ; we cannot recognise in it with any cer- 
tainty the Arundo donax. But when he finally says that all canes 
grew better when the old stumps were burnt, he must have been 
thinking of cultivated canes. Dioscorides more clearly describes 
the true Asiatic cane when he says : " One kind of cane is thick 
and hollow, it grows near rivers, and is called donax, and by some 
persons Cyprian cane " — therefore it must have been brought 
from the latter island. Another intermediate station may have 
been the island of Crete, whose inhabitants were called by Pindar 
Toxophoroi, and were celebrated through all antiquity for their 
arrows. No place in Greece proper was better fitted to receive the 
foreign cane than the shores of Lake Copais in Bceotia and of the 
rivers that flow into it ; a district which was open to Eastern 
influences at an early period. The flute-reed, kalamos auletikos, 
which grew there later, can only have been the Arundo donax, of 
which even now the Greek shepherds make their syrinxes. Perhaps 
the Sicilian canes, with which Dionysius the elder set the Achra- 
dinian gate of Syracuse on fire, had been cultivated by man — for 
the Arundo donax still grows luxuriantly on the banks of the 
Anapus. Cato gives directions for planting an arundinetum in 
damp spots and on the shores of rivers; so do his successors, 
Varro, Columella, Pliny, etc. ; and these methods, such as the 
planting of the root-stocks, the burning, the use of the canes for 
hurdles, for building houses, for supporting vines, and so on, are in 
practice at the present day. But as in Greece, so in Italy the word 
canna was a late arrival, and was indeed the name for the thinner 
and weaker common cane in contrast to the true arundo. The 
oldest author who uses it seems to be Vitruvius, who gives instruc- 
tions how to nail canntz to the walls as a ground-work for the 
plaster or stucco. Ovid, who has a liking for the word canna, dis- 
tinguishes the smaller canna from the long arundo ; and Columella 
expressly says that the common people called the degenerated 
cane canna, and believed that by age the fibres grow so close that 
" the stalks get thinner, like those of the canna." Vitruvius, 
above quoted, advises people to make use of the thinner marsh- 
cane if the Arundo Grczca be not at hand ; thus calling the 
Arundo donax after the country from which it came. And finally, 



CANE. 231 



in the latest Imperial age, Palladius uses canna as the common 
expression for the reed in general. That the word was used in 
Italy long before Vitruvius is shown by the above-mentioned deri- 
vative ca?ialis ; and the celebrated town of Cannae on the Aufidus 
in Apulia took its name, no doubt, from the canes growing there, 
as did also the ^Eolian town of Kanai in Asia Minor. The 
modern European languages possess numberless further deriva- 
tives and applications of the word : can, channel, canon (in both 
senses), cannon, canister, knaster ; in German, kanne, kannen- 
giesser (pewterer, alehouse politician), kaneel (cinnamon) ; in 
French, chanoine, cheneau (gutter), etc., all of which may finally 
be traced to the Hebrew kaneh, or its Phoenician representative. 



THE PAPYRUS. 

The Papyrus-plant^ one of the Cyperacea, or half-grasses, and 
therefore only half related to the Arundo donax, excels the latter 
in beauty and ancient fame. No one who has visited old Syracuse 
in Sicily needs to be told that this plant has found its way even 
into Europe. Near Syracuse is a small branch of the Anapus, 
leading up to the fabulous spring of Cyane (now Testa di Pisima), 
and bordered on each side with papyrus, which rises straight out 
of the shallow, clear, slowly-running water. In one particular 
place, where the little river widens into a lake-like basin, the so- 
called Camerone, the scene becomes fairy-like and truly tropical ; 
the tall canes, from twelve to sixteen or eighteen feet high, with 
their graceful feathery tops, encloses on every side like a thicket the 
liquid mirror, on which their shadows peacefully float, and at which 
their roots and stems are ever drinking. In ancient Egypt, as every 
one knows, this plant grew in enormous quantities, and was used in 
various ways ; the roots for food, the bast for ropes, baskets, mats, 
and river-boats ; the fine skins for writing paper. The Greeks 
procured their byblos-material from the Valley of the Nile, and 
called their books, writings, and letters, "bibles," after it. It is 
very remarkable that the papyrus is now quite extinct in Egypt (for 
though some travellers profess to have seen it there, they probably 
mistook some other plant for it), and is only found again — and 
then in vast quantities — on the White Nile and the Gazelle. The 
papyrus disappeared from Egypt — where it was probably an exotic 
introduced from the countries higher up — and therein it shared 
the fate of the Egyptian bean, " Kyamos Aigyptios " {Nymphcea 
nelumbo), so often mentioned by ancient writers — a proof that cul- 
ture, as it enriches a country or a whole hemisphere, will under 



PAPYRUS. 233 



altered circumstances withdraw its gift. To both plants the com- 
petition of other plants and of new inventions proved fatal ; they 
were supplanted by parchment and rag-paper, by hemp and spart- 
grass, by fruits containing more farina, etc. In Greece itself there 
has never been found a trace of a papyrus plantation, which made 
the presence of the plant in Sicily the more mysterious, till the 
Florentine botanist P. Parlatore cleared up the history of the 
Sicilian papyrus. Parlatore first distinguishes between two species 
of the plant : the old Egyptian papyrus, still found in mummies, 
and still living in Nubia and Abyssinia, which he calls Cyperus 
papyrus ; and the Sicilian papyrus, growing much taller, spreading 
at the top into a plume and not into a cup ; which was a native of 
Syria, and to which therefore he gives the name of Cyperus Syriaeus. 
This distinction does not help us much, for Syria, after all, acquired 
its papyrus only by transplantation from Egypt; and it is a historical 
fact that the ancients knew nothing of the papyrus plant in Sicily, 
so that it could not have existed in that island. It must have been 
the Arabs that brought it from Syria shortly before the beginning 
of the 10th century. Ibn Hauqal, who wrote in 977-8, is the first 
writer that mentions it. It was probably planted first on the little 
river near Palermo, which was called Papireto after it; there it 
grew abundantly till the year 1591, when the then Viceroy caused 
the whole district to be drained because of the malaria bred by the 
Papireto, and the papyrus grove was of course destroyed. But 
even now the place is called piano del papireto, and the papyrus is 
still cultivated in the public gardens there. At Syracuse it must 
have been planted about the middle of the seventeenth century, 
for a trustworthy author of the year 1624 is ignorant of its existence, 
while another of 1674 is aware of it It is now found here and 
there growing wild in the southern and eastern parts of the island, 
and is a favourite ornament in the gardens of the rich aristocracy. 
All the specimens in European hothouses seem to have been pro- 
cured from Sicily. If the Arabs had extended their dominion to 
Greece, and founded a brilliant court there, as they did at Palermo, 
this graceful ornament of river-banks would probably meet our eye 
in some of the waters of that warm country so much nearer to 
Syria, as it did once on the Papireto, and does now on the Anapo. 



CUCURBITACEOVS PLANTS. 

The fruits of this family, which are among the giants of the 
vegetable kingdom, have all come from Asia, and most of them 
from South Asia, especially India. Once spread in several varieties 
throughout the countries of the ancient civilized world, they are 
still the favourites of Southern and particularly of Eastern nations. 
Protected by a thick rind, which prevents the evaporation of the 
internal moisture, they collect during the withering heats of 
summer a quantity of ever-cold juice, by which the thirsty eater is 
refreshed. The quantity and flavour of the fruit are very different, 
according to the species : sometimes the flesh almost melts into 
water, and drops from hand and mouth while being eaten, like the 
Oriental water-melon; sometimes it forms a sweet, aromatic mass, 
as in the sugar-melon. While the above-named kinds are eaten 
ripe after taking out the seeds, the cucumber species are now only 
eaten in an unripe condition and with the seeds, or sometimes 
pickled ; the pumpkin alone is never raw, but always cooked. The 
feeble stems bear no sort of proportion to the often enormous size 
of the fruit, which lies still on the ground, gradually swelling and 
awaiting its maturity ; it cannot, like the cocoa-nut or any other 
tree-fruit, hang temptingly on high, and fall when ripe, that its 
seeds may be cast around. All this already amazed the ancients. 
Matronius, the merry parodist, called the pumpkin " Son of holy 
Earth," an epithet used before by Homer for the Titan, Tityos ; 
and if Homer's Titan, when he lay on the ground, covered nine 
plethra, Matronius's pumpkin, lying in the garden, was as long 
as nine tables in a row. Callimachus talks of the pumpkin 
growing and growing on its dewy bed, and Heraklides calls it 
" earth-loving ; " while Virgil describes the serpent cucumber 



CUCUMBER. PUMPKIN. 235 

coiling through the grass and swelling into belly-shape. In 
no other plant are so many variations, degenerations, and trans- 
formations observed as in the cucurbitacese. The reason perhaps 
lies in their excessive and therefore easily diverted creative power, 
which is also the cause of the astonishing size of some of these 
fruits. As even in ancient times the boundary-lines between 
species were very undecided, and the names in common use 
sometimes meant one kind, sometimes another, it is very difficult, 
or even impossible, to make the ancient accounts agree with our 
present knowledge of the subject, or to decide in any given case 
whether a melon, a pumpkin, or a cucumber was meant, and if so, 
which kind. 

The oldest testimony to the existence of the gourd-kind in the 
East, or rather in Egypt, is to be found in Numbers xi. 5. There 
the Israelites, wandering through the arid desert, long for the 
fruits they have left behind in Egypt : "We remember the fish 
which we did eat in Egypt freely ; the cucumbers, and the melons," 
etc. By the cucumber is most likely meant the Egyptian cucumis 
Chate, a large oval fruit, still commonly eaten under that name in 
the Levant, after it has ripened, and acquired something of the 
melon in taste and effect. At the same time, it is possible that since 
those early days some names have been shifted from one kind to 
another, among Syrians, Arabs, and Jews, and remained the same 
while one species vanished and another appeared. In the epic 
poetry of Homer and Hesiod there is neither a name for this fruit, 
nor an allusion that could lead us to suppose any knowledge of it. 
A hint might be found in the name of Sicyon, that is, cucumber- 
town, but it does not belong to a very ancient period. The fruit 
is mentioned twice in the Iliad, but only in passages that are 
later insertions. The former name of Sicyon was Mekone, the 
poppy-town, and so it is called in Hesiod's works ; legend calls the 
father of Sikyon " Marathon," the fennel-man. According to 
that, the fruitful plain of Sicyon, along the lower course of the 
Asopus, first produced the poppy (a very ancient weed, with a 
beautiful flower and edible seed, which had come over from Asia 
in company with grain), and fen?iel (a native umbelliferous plant, 
whose spicy qualities had been early discovered by the inhabi- 



236 CUCURBIT A CEO US PL A NTS. 

tants, and highly valued ever since), and then at last the cucumber 
or pumpkin brought over the sea from the East, from which 
latter culture the town on being re-founded received a new 
name. But for the long and sad gap in Grecian literature that 
separates the old epics from Pindar and ^Eschylus, we should 
perhaps be able to fix precisely the epoch at which the Greeks 
of Asia Minor and the Greeks of the European mother-land 
began to cultivate cucumbers and pumpkins. But neither the 
works of the elegiac and lyric poets, nor those of Archilochus, 
the "second Homer," have come down to us, though they still 
existed in Christian times, and only fell victims to the destructive 
zeal of the Church and her bishops. We know by accident that 
Alcaeus once used the word sikys, which, among other meanings, 
has that of cucumber ; the plant, therefore, existed at the time of 
Alcaeus. But what did the poet mean by sikys ? That word, as 
we believe, is but another form of sukon, a fig ; as in the fig, so in 
the cucumber and pumpkin, the Prcegnans cucurbita, it was the 
exuberance of reproductive power, the wealth of seed, that arrested 
the attention of the child of nature. Later on, a distinctive name 
was found for the Pumpkin, Tzolokyntha, kolokente, of which Aris- 
totle's pupil Phanias says the fruit was uneatable except when 
boiled or fried, which can only apply to the pumpkin. The idea 
at the bottom of the name is analogous to that in sikys, sikyos, 
namely that of colossal size : kolok-ynte, from kolossos (i.e., kolokios), 
and we find the same word in the surname of the Sicyonian 
Athena, Kolokasia, the pumpkin goddess. The saying, " Healthier 
than a pumpkin," used by Epicharmus, points to the same idea ; 
as well as another, " Within seven days I'll set him before you, 
either as a cucumber or as a lily : " that is, alive or dead. 
That the pumpkin was something new and extraordinary, not fit- 
ting into the known order of nature, is seen from the laughable 
disputation of the Academic philosophers in the Gymnasium, as 
described by the comic poet Epicrates : it is asked, what sort of a 
plant is the pumpkin ? the thinkers bend their heads in deep 
meditation ; suddenly one says it is a round vegetable, another 
that it is a herb, another a sort of tree — on which they are rudely 
interrupted by a Sicilian physician present, after which Plato con- 



CUCUMBER. PUMPKIN. MELON. 237 

tinues the inquiry with undisturbed gravity. But specially note- 
worthy is the fact that the kolokynte, even at a late period, is now 
and then called Indike, the Indian fruit, with the express addition 
that it is so called because it came from India. — A third, and still 
later name, pepon, is really the adjective ripe (the noun sikyos 
being understood), meaning a fruit that must be mature before it 
can be eaten. This name therefore excluded such cucumbers 
as were eaten in the first tender stage of their growth, while the 
other kinds that with ripeness attained a melon-like sweetness, and 
were eaten fresh from the garden, might also be called pepones. 

All these passages, and many others not mentioned, from 
ancient authors, may equally apply to cucumber and to pumpkin, 
while not one can with certainty be applied to the real Melon. 
In none of them are the honey sweetness (boiled melon-juice is 
still used by the Orientals instead of sugar), the melting pulp, the 
golden or delicate white colour, the ambrosial odour, mentioned. 
It is only during the later period of the Roman Empire that we 
find the melo reckoned among delicacies ; in which melo we recog- 
nize without difficulty our sugar-melon. Pliny relates that in 
Campania there arose accidentally a cucumber of the nature and 
golden colour of the quince, which was then propagated by sowing 
the seeds ; that the wonderful thing about these melopepones, be- 
sides their shape and odour, was that, as soon as they were ripe, 
they detached themselves from the stalk. Here, for the first time, we 
hear of the odour of this fruit ; its Greek name (from melon, quince) 
originated in Grecian Campania ; and afterwards, when the fruit 
became generally known, was popularly shortened into melo. No 
one will believe that the melon was produced from the cucumber 
in Campania by a freak of nature ; whence, then, did it come ? 
Alphonse Decandolle, in his " Geographie Botanique," says the 
melon was originally a product of Tartary and the Caucasus. By 
Tartary he probably meant only ancient Bactria and Sogdiana, 
the oases on the Oxus and Jaxartes ; and thence the fruit may 
have been brought to the gardens of Naples in the course of the first 
Christian century. We have no positive historical notice of the 
latter fact, but this kind of fruit is very easily carried to the most 
distant regions by means of the seed, and the first attempts may 



238 CUCURBITACEOVS PLANTS. 

have passed unobserved or been forgotten. Marco Polo says of 
the country west of Balkh : " Here grow the best melons in the 
world. They are cut into round slices and dried in the sun. 
Thus dried they are sweeter than honey, and are exported to all 
countries." Vambery praises the melons of Khiva : "Khiva has 
no rival in melons, either in Asia or in the whole world. No 
European can imagine the sweet aromatic odour of this delicious 
fruit. It melts in the mouth, and, eaten with bread, is the most 
pleasant and refreshing food ever afforded by nature." Persia, 
too, is an excellent country for melons; there grow the finest 
sorts, which are treated with great care and highly valued. Tie 
varieties are innumerable, changing from village to village, and 
among them are some of wide and well-deserved fame. " Melons," 
says E. Polak, " are among the most important necessaries of life 
in the Persian towns ; in the price-tariffs they are mentioned next 
after bread, rice, meat, cheese, butter, and ice. They are so 
sweet that a Persian laughs at the idea of Europeans eating their 
melons with sugar." All this speaks in favour of the sugar-melon 
being there an indigenous fruit ; but, as Polak adds, they are dan- 
gerous food for a foreigner, and sometimes also for the natives, 
who do not escape the consequences of indulging in them too 
freely. 

The Latin names for the cucumber and pumpkin, cucumis and 
cucurbita, reflect by the Reduplication (cu-cu) the impression of 
exuberant growth made on the popular mind by these fruits ; at 
the same time, cucurbita is so similar to cordis, a basket, vessel, 
corbita, a ship of burden, and corbitare, to lade; and also cucumis 
(Genit. cucumeris) to cumera, cumerum, a covered vessel ; that it is 
not easy to reject the connexion. The rind of the gourd or 
pumpkin has from time immemorial been used as a vessel, and is 
still so used under the name of calabash ; may it not be that the 
inhabitants of the Italian coast first beheld these green rinds as 
vessels in the hands of foreign sailors, before they had an oppor- 
tunity of eating the fruit themselves, and afterwards even planting 
it ? We learn from Pliny that pumpkin-fo/to were used to keep 
wine in. 

During the early Middle Ages there appeared in Byzantium a 



WATER-MELON. 239 



new name for the cucumber which had come from the East, and 
in course of time spread from nation to nation all through Europe. 
This was a Persic- Aramaic word, angourion, and seems to have 
been applied to those sorts of cucumber that we now use for salads 
and pickling. The cucumbers of antiquity seem to have been a 
large kind, no longer cultivated in Europe, eaten as a refreshment, 
and also boiled or baked according to its stage of maturity. From 
Byzantium the cucumber, as the name proves, reached the Slavs 
(Russ. ogurets, ogiirka, Pol. ogbrek, etc.), and became a favourite 
and common food of all the nations of that race, as well as of the 
neighbouring Tartars and Mongols. The Great and Little Rus- 
sian cannot live without cucumbers ; he eats them salted through 
the winter, and with their help endures the long and strict fasts of 
the Eastern Church. From the Slavs the agurke, later shortened 
to gurke, came to the Germans, but only in quite recent times, for 
the name can only be traced back to the seventeenth century. It 
is an interesting ethnographical fact that the so-called "saure 
gurke," or salted cucumber, has only become common in those 
parts of Germany which were formerly inhabited by Slavs, and 
which afterwards became Germanized. Besides this, it is said 
that the small, greenish, well-tasting Slavonian cucumber, com- 
mon all over Russia, degenerates when transplanted to Germany ■ 
it seems, therefore, to need an extreme climate. 

The juicy Water-melon (Cucumis citrullus) is likewise a plant 
first known in the Middle Ages, for it cannot be proved that it 
is the pepo of the ancients, as many believe. In Italian it bears 
the Byzantine name anguria (in some districts cocomero, from 
cucumis), in French the Arabic name pasteque. South of the Alps 
it is greatly valued because of its refreshing qualities during the 
summer heat, and everywhere one sees this fruit cut in halves, 
with its blood-red pulp and black seeds, piled up in the markets 
or at the corners of streets ; and the tables where it is sold in 
slices for a small copper coin, are surrounded with a thirsty crowd 
of workmen, soldiers, and others. It ripens in August, just when 
the heat is greatest, and the drier and hotter the season has 
been, the sweeter and juicier it is. 

But it is far more important in the East, and among the half- 



2 4 o CUCURBITACEOUS PLANTS. 

Orientals in South-eastern Europe. There the glowing summer 
and keen air are highly favourable to this annual. It is cultivated 
in large fields, and sent to the towns at the proper time by waggon 
loads. The water-melon is found throughout Western Asia, Persia, 
and the countries of the Caucasus to the Lower Danube, Hungary, 
and Wallachia, but particularly in the rich and dry plains of South 
Russia and the neighbouring half-steppe, half-garden lands of Asia. 
For at least two months in the year the Russian inhabitant of the 
steppes lives entirely upon arbuzes — such is the Tartar-Slavic name 
of the fruit — and a little bread. When the northern traveller in 
his clumsy " tarantas " has gradually approached that region, one 
look at the melon-fields and the tall sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) 
which generally stand beside them, and whose seeds yield a favourite 
oil, assures him that he has crossed the threshold of the East. In the 
countries of the Caucasus, so rich in splendid fruits, in grapes and 
nuts, the natives, be they of what race they may, generally despise 
all other delicacies as compared with the juice of the water-melon, 
which tastes to us like cucumber water slightly sweetened. The 
Mod. Persic name hindevane, " Indian fruit," throws a clear light 
on the home of the fruit, and the Tartar name kharpuz, karpus, 
taken with the modern Greek karpousia and the Slavic arbfiz, tells 
us whence it came to the Greeks, Russians, and Poles. (A similar 
change is seen in the Greek osteon and Slav, kosti, in Hypanis and 
Kuban, and in the Alanic name Aspar and German Gaspar, Caspar.) 
So the water-melon migrated to Persia when communication with 
India was newly opened, either during the Arabian or Mongolian 
dominion ; to Greece in company with the Turk, to Russia from 
the Tartar kingdoms of Astrakhan and Kazan ; while its propaga- 
tors in Little Prussia were probably the Cossacks of the Dnieper. 
The Polish name for water-melon, kawon, is also an Oriental word. 
The old Slavic name of the pumpkin, tykva y we have already con- 
nected (see art. Fig) with the Greek sikua, and the Polish banya 
(water-melon) seems to be the same as banya (vessel, bath), a 
terminology quite analogous to the ancient Greek and Roman. 
The German words Mrbiss, pfebe, melone, come from Latin, as the 
fruits they designate came from Italy ; not from Hungary there- 
fore, or the Byzantine Empire. 



THE DOMESTIC FOWL. 

The domestic fowl made its appearance in Western Asia and in 
Europe much later than one would imagine. The civilized Semitic 
races cannot have been acquainted with the fowl, for it is nowhere 
mentioned in the Old Testament. It is never seen on Egyptian 
monuments, otherwise so full of the details of ancient housekeep- 
ing on the Nile. There we see flocks of tame geese being driven 
home from the pasture, we see them and their eggs being carefully 
counted, but nowhere cocks and hens ; and when Aristotle and 
Diodorus say that eggs were artificially hatched in Egypt by bury- 
ing them in dung, they must mean the eggs of geese and ducks, 
or refer to a period later than the Persian conquest, which Dio- 
dorus seems to hint, for he commences his account of the hatch- 
ing ovens with the words: "The Egyptians inherited many customs 
relating to the breeding and rearing of animals from their fore- 
fathers, but other things they have invented, among which the 
most wonderful is the artificial hatching of eggs." The domestic 
fowl is aboriginal in India, where its supposed parent species, the 
Bankiva fowl, still exists from Further India and the Indian islands 
to Cashmere. The domestic fowl first migrated to the West with 
the Medo-Persian invaders. In a work on the Temple of the 
Samian Hera, Menodotus says that as the cock spread from Persis, 
so the sacred peacock spread from the Temple of Hera to the sur- 
rounding districts. In the religion of Zoroaster the dog and the 
cock were sacred animals ; the first as the faithful guardian of house 
and flocks, the second as the herald of dawn and the symbol of 
light and the sun. 

The cock is specially dedicated to Craosha, the heavenly watch- 
man, who, awakened by fire, awakens the cock in his turn ; he by 

16 



242 THE DOMESTIC FOWL. 

his crowing drives away the dahas, evil spirits of darkness, par- 
ticularly the yellow, long-fingered Bushyacta, the demon of sleep. 
In the 1 8th Fargard of the Vendidad we read: "Then answered 
Ahura-mazda, ' The bird that bears the name of Parodars, O holy 
Zarathustra, but upon whom evil-speaking men inflict the name of 
Kahrkatac, this bird raises his voice at each divine dawn.' " So 
that Ormuzd himself had commended the bird to Zoroaster. A 
passage in the Bundehesh runs : " Halka the cock is the 
enemy of the Devs and Magicians. He assists the dog, as it is 
written in the law. Among the earthly creatures that plague Daruj, 
the cock and the dog unite their strength. He shall keep watch 
over the world, even as if there were no dog to protect the flocks 
(or houses). When the dog and the cock fight with Daruj, they 
weaken him, who else would torment men and animals. There- 
fore it is said, By him (the cock) shall all the enemies of good- 
ness be overcome ; his voice scatters the evil." Wherever a 
Persian settled, he took as much care to procure a cock as to pray 
and wash before and during sunrise. As far as the limits of the 
Persian dominion reached, there, no doubt, the tame and useful, 
easily transported, and at the same time so peculiar creature, 
found a welcome in the households even of non-believers. On the 
so-called Harpies' monument from the Acropolis of Xanthus in 
Lycia (now in London) there is the figure of a god to whom a 
cock is brought as a gift or as a sacrifice. If this monument, as 
archaeologists suppose, really belongs to a period before the taking 
of Xanthus by the Persians, then the Lycians must indeed have 
been acquainted with the cock before the spread of the Persian 
dominion. But the archaic style of the scenes represented, though 
in Greece it might point to a more or less fixed epoch, has no decided 
chronological value as regards Lycia, for we are ignorant of the 
development of art in that country. The Acropolis was burned 
down by the inhabitants themselves before the city was taken by 
the Persians, and no doubt the monuments were also destroyed. 
That such a monument could not be erected during the Persian 
rule, which was only a kind of suzerainty, and left the Lycians in 
comparative independence, is an assertion that has no foundation. 
If the domestic fowl had been familiar to the Lycians long before 



THE DOMESTIC FOWL. 243 

the Persian time, the Greeks must have shared in the knowledge ; 
but neither in the works of Homer and Hesiod, nor in the frag- 
ments of the elder poets, is there any trace of cock or hen. Surely, 
among people who had no clocks, the prophet that proclaimed the 
hours by night, the proudly strutting, winking, crowing Sir Chan- 
ticleer, the supremely jealous sultan (sa/ax galhis) surrounded by 
his harem, the hot vainglorious champion armed with his comb, 
tassels, and spurs, and Dame Partlet announcing to the world 
with a chuckle her last achievement : all this merry parody of a 
human family and aristocratic manners could not fail to be a 
frequent subject of description and comparison, had the poets had 
any opportunity of observing it. It did not escape even the 
ancients, that Homer, though he used the proper names Alektor 
and Alektryon, seemed to know nothing of the fowl so-called. 

The oldest mention of the cock is in Theognis, who wrote in 
the latter half of the sixth century B.C., and no doubt lived to 
witness the conquest of the Ionians by Harpagus, and the occupa- 
tion of Samos by the Persians. But the mixture of so much that 
is spurious in our collection of his poems makes them no very 
safe foundation to build chronology upon. As for the " Battle 
of Frogs and Mice," in which the cock is mentioned, both the 
condition of the text and the probably late origin of the work 
make it still less possible to draw from it any conclusion. If, as 
Pliny relates, the celebrated athlete Milo of Croton really made 
use of the gemma alectoria, i.e., the jewel found in the stomach of 
a cock, as an amulet which enabled him to conquer his opponents, 
the period would agree with that of Theognis ; but this legend 
was only applied to Milo by later authors. However, in the 
writings of Epicharmus, who flourished during the Persian wars, 
and in those of Simonides, ^Eschylus, and Pindar, we find the 
cock already mentioned under the proud name of alektor as the 
usual companion of man. Poets pretty early compare the quarrels 
of men to the fights between cocks inhabiting the same yard. In 
the " Eumenides " of ^Eschylus, Athena warns the Athenians 
against civil war as resembling the combats of cocks. Pindar 
compares the inglorious victories of civil war to the victories of a 
barn-door fowl. Themistocles is said to have raised the courage 



244 THE DOMESTIC FOWL. 

of his army by reminding them how two fighting cocks risk their 
lives, not for the hearth and its penates, but for fame alone. 
When afterwards the public cock-fights, which are represented 
on innumerable ancient monuments, were supposed to be derived 
from the above speech of Themistocles, it proves at least that 
cock-fighting was not thought of as older than the Persian wars. 
The comic poets still call the cock the Persian bird. In the 
" Birds " of Aristophanes he goes by the comical name of Medos, 
the Mede, and Peithetairos wonders how, being a Mede, he could 
have got there without his camel. In two respective passages 
written by the tragic poet Ion, a flute in the form of a cock chants 
the Lydian song, and the shepherd's pipe is called the Cock of 
Mount Ida. — But whence came the word alektor, alektryon, which 
bears such an eminently Greek stamp ? It must have arisen, or 
rather been invented (perhaps as an adaptation of the Iranic 
lialka, alka), in Ionia, when the cities there, on the overthrow of 
Croesus, fell into Persian hands, and opened their gates not only 
to the garrisons, but to the religion of the victors and to their 
sacred animals. The wonderful, light-announcing bird of the sun, 
which bore the priestly name of parodars, was called — at a time 
that was awaking out of the dreams of myth, and beginning to 
rebel against epic legend and epic language — by the equally mystic 
and significant name of alektor. Such names as elektor Hyperion 
(the radiant traveller, the sun), elektron (shining metal, sun-coloured 
amber), Elektra (goddess of the shining, watery mirror), Elektryon 
(the son of Perseus, the Elektrian islands, the Elektrian gate at 
Thebes, etc.), and also the forms with a, Alektryon, Alektor, were 
familiar to every educated and pious man from Homer and the 
heroic mythus ; and Empedocles, in a verse enumerating the 
elements, calls fire elektor. It is true that afterwards, when the 
original meaning of the old word was generally forgotten, it was 
commonly derived from lektron, a bed, either with a- copulative, 
giving the sense of bed-fellow, or with a- privative, meaning the 
bed-less, unsleeping one, which seemed very suitable for a cock. 
But the appearance of the new name in the two forms alektor and 
alektryon — the first reserved for poetic, the other given up to every- 
day use — is a telling proof that it was formed on the model of 



THE DOMES'! 1C FOWL. 245 

those mythic hero-names. Again, the fact that as late as Aristo- 
phanes there was no settled form for the feminine, so that he 
makes fun of those who called a hen alektryaina, speaks strongly 
for the novelty both of the name and of the thing. In this animal, 
of all others, a clear distinction between the two sexes was an 
imperative necessity ; it was Aristotle that first used the feminine 
form alektoris, but in the generic sense of " fowl." As the cock 
first appeared at a late period, when mythic production was just 
dying out, it could never attain any prominent religious importance. 
As a fighting-cock it was naturally sacred to Ares and to Pallas 
Athena. Plutarch relates that at Sparta, on the close of a cam- 
paign, two kinds of sacrifice were in use : he who had attained his 
end by craft and persuasion sacrificed a bullock; he who had 
gained it by fighting, a cock. At Olympia the figure of a cock 
from the hand of Onatas, announcing or signifying the sun, was to 
be seen on the shield of Idomeneus, who was the grandson of 
Pasiphae, and therefore a descendant of the Sun-god. Plutarch 
speaks of an image of Apollo with a cock perched on one hand, 
the symbol of the God of the Sun. On the coins of Phaestus in 
Crete may be seen the figure of a youthful god, evidently a per- 
sonification of the sun, holding with his right hand a cock which 
sits in his lap. Plato's Phaedo has taught every one that the cock 
was sacrificed to Asklepios the God of Healing. A superstition 
peculiar to the rocky town of Methana, between Epidauros and 
Troezen, mentioned by Pausanias, is likewise connected with the 
worship of Apollo in that district. To avert the evil influence of 
Lips, the south-east wind, on the vines, two men would cut a cock 
in halves, and each run with one half in opposite directions round 
the vineyard, and then bury the bird on the spot where they met. 
Soon after the appearance of cocks and hens in Greece, whole 
families of these fowls must have been transported to Sicily and 
South Italy, and there, as in Greece, spread from house to house. 
That the Sybarites would suffer no cocks near them for fear of 
being disturbed in their sleep is one of those late-invented anec- 
dotes by which people proved their wit. Sybaris was destroyed 
in 510 B.C., when the cock was unknown in Italy, or only just 
introduced. The figure of a cock may be seen on coins of Himera 



246 THE DOMESTIC FOWL. 

in Sicily, and sometimes the figure of a hen on the reverse side, 
perhaps as an attribute of Asklepios, the genius of the healing 
springs of the place. The oldest representations of the cock on 
coins and vases in Greece, Sicily, and Italy, never go beyond the 
date we have given, namely, the second half of the sixth century 

B.C. 

The Romans, to whom the bird was brought either directly or 
indirectly from one of these Greek towns, made use of it with truly 
Roman religious craft as a means of prophecy in war; as no 
augur accompanied the march of the army, and auspicia ex avibus 
were therefore impossible, the expedient was resorted to of taking 
tame fowls in a cage so as to obtain auspicia ex tripudiis. If the 
fowls ate greedily of the food thrown to them, so that pieces of it 
fell from their beaks, it was a tripudium solistimum, a sign favour- 
able to the proposed undertaking; if the contrary happened, it 
was understood as a warning against it. Of course the pullarius 
or fowl-keeper had the issue of the experiment in his own power, 
according as he fed or starved the fowls beforehand. That this 
custom was of late origin is proved by the rather sceptical reception 
it met with at a period when religion was no longer so ardent. Cicero 
relates that a general in the first Punic war, P. Claudius Pulcher, 
ordered the sacred fowls to be thrown into the water because they 
would not touch the food given them. " If they will not eat," he 
cried, "let them drink;" but he paid for this blasphemy with the 
loss of his fleet. Cicero himself does not speak very respectfully of 
divination by fowls, and Pliny is ironically astonished that the most 
important affairs of state, decisive battles and victories, should be 
determined by fowls, and the ruler of the world be ruled by them 
in turn. Fowls play no great part in Cato's "Rural Economy" — 
he only describes in one passage how fowls and geese should be 
stuffed; but the ample directions as to the treatment of these 
domestic birds given by Varro and Columella show how greatly 
developed and extended was the breeding and care of fowls in 
their time. 

Large and improved varieties of the Asiatic fowl, especially of 
fighting cocks, were procured from various places in Greece, 
famous for particular breeds and races. In earlier times the Isle 



THE DOMESTIC FOWL. 247 

of Delos had been thus celebrated, and Cicero relates that the 
Delians could tell by looking at an egg which hen had laid it 
(not such a very difficult thing either, for to say "as like as two 
eggs" is not saying much); but now the fowls of Tanagra, Rhodes, 
and Chalcis stood in the highest repute for strength and beauty. 
Varro, Columella, and Pliny also mention the large so-called 
Melic fowls {galltnce melicce), which Varro (who was also a phi- 
lologist) says ought really to be called Medtcce, Median fowls. From 
this we gather that Media, whence fowls were first brought into 
Europe, still kept supplying fresh blood even in the Roman times; 
but, for that very reason, the form meliccz may be the more 
correct one, representing the Old Bactrian meregha, bird, Persic 
murg/i, Kurdic mrisAk, and Ossetic margh, hen, which would 
also in that case be the original (distorted by popular etymology) 
of the Greek meleagris. 

There is no direct historical testimony as to the manner in which 
domestic fowls were introduced into Central and Southern Europe. 
They may have come straight from Asia to the kindred nations 
of the South Russian steppes and the eastern slopes of the Car- 
pathian mountains, whose religion agreed with that of the other 
Iranian races, and some of whom already practised agriculture in 
the time of Herodotus; or by way of the Greek colonies on the 
Black Sea, the influence of which, as is well-known, spread far 
and wide; or from Thrace to the tribes on the Danube ; or from 
Italy by way of the ancient commercial roads across the Alps; 
or through Massilia to the regions of the Rhone and Rhine; or, 
finally, by several of these ways at once. The more a people of 
nomadic habits accustomed themselves to a settled mode of life, 
the more easily would the domestic fowl find shelter and accept- 
ance among them. In the middle of the first century B.C. Caesar 
found fowls among the Britons, though perhaps only among those 
who tilled the ground near the south coast and had adopted the 
culture of the Gauls. When we examine the different languages, we 
are furnished with interesting results. We see several sets of names 
running from nation to nation, sometimes crossing each other, 
and throwing a faint light on the residences and intercourse of 
those nations. As the domestic fowl was unknown in Greece 



248 THE DOMESTIC FOWL. 

before the latter half of the sixth century B.C., we dare not fix the 
date of its arrival in Central Europe before the fifth century; 
and that which was quickly accomplished in civilized Greece 
could only gradually and slowly come to pass in the barbaric 
North. At about that period — 

(i) The Germans must already have formed a separate whole, 
for they distinguished the bird by a name proper to them alone, 
hana. 

(2) They must have been living together in a circumscribed 
space, for all the Germanic races alike have the name ; conse- 
quently they were not yet divided into a Scandinavian and a Con- 
tinental branch. 

(3) The Germans must have been immediate neighbours to the 
Finns, for the Gothic word is found again in Finnic (not in Lettic, 
Lithuanian, etc.). 

(4) The German consonant-change cannot yet have commenced, 
for the German hana sounds in the Finnic Kana. 

(5) The creative impulse in the language of the Germans of that 
period was still so naturalistically fine and active that, with the 
smallest possible vocal means, it formed separate names for the 
male, female, and young of the animal, as it had done already in 
" bull, cow, and calf," etc. From the Gothic hana — which itself 
has a very archaic shape, being formed with no other assistance 
than the n so frequent in noun-stems — there were derived, first, a 
neuter noun (Old High Germ, huon, therefore Gothic hon) 
meaning a chicken of either sex, and latterly a fowl in general, like 
our Germ. huh?i; secondly, by means of a j'=y, a feminine noun 
to signify the female sex (Old High Germ, henna, therefore Gothic 
hanjo) — both uncommonly primitive formations. 

(6) Slavs and Lithuanians must have been already separated, 
for they have different names for the cock. 

(7) The Slav nation must even in their original home have 
formed two groups, what is now the western, and what is now the 
north-eastern and southern; for the name/zV//z/for a cock is found 
only among the latter, and kogut, kohut, principally among the 
former ; at the same time the first word, in its meaning of " the 
singer," though not in its etymology, agrees with the Lithuanian 
and perhaps the German word. 



THE DOMESTIC FOWL. 249 

(8) The Slavs, after their separation from the Lithuanians, must 
have had a connexion (of which there are other indications) with 
the Medo-Persian races (Scythians, Sauromatians, Budini, Alani), 
because the words kuru and kura (cock and hen), common to all 
Slavs, are also Persic : churu, churtih, churus. 

(9) The tik, tyuk (hen) of the Magyars agrees exactly with the 
Kurdic dik (cock), which again is Arabic. Did they borrow it — 
like their word for thousand — direct from an Iranian nation, while 
they still dwelt beyond the Volga in the land of the present 
Bashkirs ? 

(to) A singular chain of names runs from the Channel to the 
farthest corner of the Baltic, *.<?., from the French (not Provencal) 
and Armoric cog to the Finnic kukko, and extends to other Finnish 
races; while as a diminutive word ktich-lein, chick-en, etc., the 
same word prevails among the Low Germans, Anglo-Saxons, and 
Scandinavians (not among the High Germans) ; in other words, 
has stuck to the soil along the line we have mentioned. 

(11) No trace points directly to Italy, but all more or less lead 
to the south-east of the continent, which is only the case with 
Iranian, not Semitic, acquisitions of culture. If the Old Thracian 
and Old Illyrian or Pannonian languages had been preserved, 
perhaps the similarity of sounds afforded by the Greek would 
grow into full identity. 

(12) The Old Bactrian kahrka, fowl (which we infer from 
kahrkdga, fowl-eater, i.e., vulture), entirely agrees with the Old Irish 
cere, hen, cerc-dae, gallinaceus. Between these comes the Ossetic 
kyark, hen, and the gloss in Hesychius, " kerkos, cock," a name 
used somewhere in the Balkan peninsula; perhaps also the Gothic 
hruk, cock-crow, and the corresponding verb hrukjan. The word 
therefore goes straight across the European continent from the 
Pontus to the Channel and beyond ; and it dates from the time 
when Celtic races were partly roving, and had partly settled down, 
from Gaul to the Black Sea. 

(13) It was natural that the religious ideas connected with the 
bird and its name should accompany them in their migrations from 
land to land. The phrase, "To set the red cock on his roof" 
( = set his house on fire) names — instead of the element itself — the 



250 THE DOMESTIC FOWL. 

bird sacred to it and related to it in idea. A passage in the 
"Volumen decretorum" of Bishop Burchard of Worms, which says 
it is dangerous to leave the house at night before cock-crowing, 
" for then foul spirits have more power to harm, and the cock by 
his song can do more to scare and quiet them than the god-like 
spirit in man by faith and the signing of the cross," sounds like a 
faithful report of the old Persians' belief in the foul spirits they 
called dafoas, and in the power of the cock's voice to drive them 
away. In Hamlet, Horatio says, in quite the same sense — 

" I have heard 
The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn, 
Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat 
Awake the god of day ; and, at his warning, 
Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air, 
The extravagant and erring spirit hies 
To his confine." 

The sacrificing of the bird of day at night-time to the Goddess of 
Night in Ovid belongs to the same circle of ideas. The Slavonian 
Pomeranians also reverenced the cock, and worshipped it on 
their knees ; among the Lithuanians, the cock and hen were 
sacrificed to the Goddess Earth, and when a new house was 
blessed those birds were let in first. The old Indian law-book 
forbade the eating of the flesh of fowls ; and the priests of Eleusis 
also denied themselves this food, for the birds were sacred to the 
Chthonian goddess Persephone and to Demeter. Caesar surprises 
us by saying of the Britons, " They think it unlawful to eat hares, 
fowls, or geese ; " so that with the bird and its name they had also 
taken over the dread of its divinity. As the Romans had recourse to 
tame fowls for prophecy when wild birds and bird-gazers were not 
to be had, so the heathen Danes in Zealand every ninth year 
sacrificed cocks — together with men, horses, and dogs — because 
they could find no birds of prey : " cocks instead of hawks," says 
the chronicler Thietmar. As Plutarch informs us that a white 
cock was sacrificed to Anubis, as the ruler of the upper world, and 
a saffron or brimstone-coloured cock to the same god, under the 
name of Hermanubis, as ruler of the under-world; so in the 
Voluspa, the oldest part of the Edda, the golden-combed cock, 



THE DOMESTIC FOWL. 251 

the symbol of light, chants in Valhalla, and the demonic black 
cock in the halls of Hel; and popular legends make a similar 
distinction between the white, red, and black cock. 

The Russians under Sviatoslav sacrificed to the dead at night 
near Dorostolum on the Ister, by strangling sucklings and cocks 
and throwing them into the river ; and at the funeral of a Russian 
chief, described by Ibn-Foszlan, cocks and hens are slaughtered 
and thrown to the dead man in the boat. If it be true that the 
cock was peculiarly sacred to the god Donar, Thunar, or Thor — 
this German god must have been substituted for Craosha, or a 
corresponding god of the intermediary nations. Now, as the 
northern races, when this novel and strange animal first appeared 
among them, were still in a quite elementary state of consciousness, 
and could only utter the impressions they received in fumbling 
figurative language, there is no doubt that many new superstitions 
about the cock would spontaneously take root and spread amongst 
them. And our comparative mythologists, who avail themselves 
of the real or supposed agreement of mythic notions, names, 
sayings, fairy tales, incantations, and customs among the ancient 
and modern nations of Europe and Asia, to construct a copious 
and highly imaginative "primitive mythology of the Indo-European 
race," should remember three things at every step they take • 
first, that, so far as our vision extends, there has also been an 
immense deal of borrowing both in culture and religion ; secondly, 
that the same circumstances and stages of life have called forth 
similar movements at widely different points and at very different 
times ; and thirdly, that, within certain limits, mere chance must 
be allowed its due. 

Instead of following the history of the cock through the Middle 
Ages and all the five continents, for this useful fowl has penetrated 
even to the negroes in the heart of Africa, we prefer to conclude 
with the words of worthy old Thomas Hyde ( Veterum Persarum et 
Parthorum et Medorum religionis historia, ed. 2, Oxonii, 1760, 
4to, p. 22) : "To this day Media is so rich in fowls that travellers 
in that country live almost entirely on fowls and their eggs, with 
the addition of mutton. From this region came that most useful 
bird, and is spreading all over the world. It is good to know 



252 THE DOMESTIC FOWL. 

this, because in the course of time foreign things have become, 
as it were, indigenous amongst us, and we forget whence they 
first came. And this is true of many plants and trees and not 
a few animals " — words that we might have prefixed as a motto 
to the whole of this book (note 68). 



THE PIGEON, 

Homer frequently mentions doves under the names of peleiai r 
peleiades, but nothing leads us to suppose that he meant the 
domestic pigeon. Pigeons are to Homer the symbol of flight 
and timidity; thus Artemis, deprived of her bow and arrows by 
Hera, flies the field — 

" So when the falcon wings his way above, 
To the cleft cavern speeds the gentle dove." 

Hector flies before Achilles like a timid dove from the falcon — 

" Thus at the panting dove a falcon flies 
(The swiftest racer of the liquid skies) : 
Just when he holds or thinks he holds his prey, 
Obliquely wheeling through the aerial way," etc. 

Therefore Homer's favourite adjective for the dove is treron 
(shy, fleeting) ; and iEschylus calls it the "trembling dove." In the 
legend of the Argonauts the dove is the swiftest of birds. The 
ship Argo, as the name indicates, was wonderfully swift, and if 
a dove had time to fly through between the clashing rocks, the 
heroes' ship could hope to sail past unhurt. Circe's warning as 
to the Symplegades in the Odyssey owes its origin to this legend 
of the Argonauts — 

" High o'er the main two rocks exalt their brow, 
The boiling billows thundering roll below ; 
Through the vast waves the dreadful wonders move, 
Hence named Erratic by the gods above. 
No bird of air, no dove of swiftest wing, 
That bears ambrosia to the Ethereal King, 
Shuns the dire rocks ; in vain she cuts the skies ; 
The dire rocks meet, and crush her as she flies." 



254 THE PIGEON. 



The tragic poets speak of the dove as being swift as the storm 
wind, swift as rage or revenge. It is true that the falcon is still 
swifter, being the very swiftest of all birds, for it hunts the dove, 
and is only excelled by the Phaeacian ship that carried the sleep- 
ing Ulysses to Ithaca : " So fast she flew, that wheeling hawk, 
fleetest of fowl, could not keep pace." 

The rocks and woods of Greece were so peopled with doves, 
ring-doves, rock-doves, turtle-doves, that the part these birds 
play in poetry and legend cannot surprise us. The Catalogue of 
Ships in the Iliad speaks of Boeotian Thisbe and Lacedaemonian 
Messe as poly-treron, many-doved ; and ^Eschylus calls the Isle of 
Salamis " dove-nourishing." Doves and thrushes were caught 
in nets or snares fixed in the bushes, as is proved by a simile in 
the Odyssey — 

" Thus on some tree hung struggling in the snare, 
The doves or thrushes flap their wings in air ; " 

it is therefore not surprising that in the 23rd book of the Iliad 
Achilles ties a living dove to the mast of a ship as a target in the 
games held at the burial of Patroclus. The skilful Teucer shoots 
first, but having neglected to make his vows to Apollo, he only 
cuts the string, and the liberated dove wends her flight to heaven ; 
then Meriones deftly grasps his bow, prays, and brings down the 
circling dove. Hence the dove became the mythic symbol of 
an escaped prisoner. The three daughters of Anius at Delos — 
Oino, Spermo, and Elai's — who changed everything they touched 
into wine, corn, and oil, and were therefore called Oinotropoi, 
changed themselves into doves and flew away, when Agamemnon 
was about to chain them and take them by force to Troy (Ovid's 
" Metamorphoses "). The oracle of Dodona in Epirus proves that 
the dove was considered a daemonic prophetic bird ; at that shrine 
the ring-doves in the sacred oak announced the will of Zeus by 
their flight and cooings, the noise of their wings, their coming 
or going, rising or sinking ; while bird-oracles were also a very 
ancient custom over Italy, a country that in many respects re- 
sembled the Epirote lands of Greece. The ancient Veneti used 
to scatter cakes in the fields for the crows, so that they might 
/pare the seed. 



THE PIGEON. 255 



In all the passages we have quoted from the epics the dove or 
pigeon is called peleia ; only once in Homer does the later word 
phassa occur as part of the adjective phasso-phonos, dove-killing, 
an epithet of the hawk. A third name, phaps, Gen. phabos, is 
first found in ^Eschylus, who describes a poor unhappy dove 
pecking at the corn, and getting its bones crushed by the winnow- 
ing-spade. Later and more scientific zoology (Aristotle) uses 
these names to distinguish different kinds of doves, and adds 
oinas, literally wine-dove, and trygon, the turtle-dove, named 
from its cooing (tryzo), and first used by Aristophanes in "The 
Birds." In the primitive time these names were probably given 
without distinction, according to the speaker's locality, or some 
quality of the bird that he happened to be thinking of, to wild 
doves in general ; for the Dodonian " peleia," which lived in trees, 
columba palumbus, cannot possibly have been the same as the 
" peleia " in Homer, which hides in the cleft of a rock, the columba 
livia, or rock pigeon. The true name of the pigeon, and with 
it the pigeon itself, appears only in the later Attic dialect ; first 
in Sophocles, with the unmistakable epithets, oiketis (house-dove) 
and ephestios (hearth-dove), then in the Comic poets and Plato ; 
namely, peristeros, peristera, the cock and hen, peristerideus, etc., 
the young, peristereon, the dove-cot — a new set of words never 
accepted by the Doric dialect, which continued to say peleias. 
From what region did this friendly domestic bird, which was 
quite common in Athens towards the end of the fifth century 
B.c, come to the Greeks ? And was the tame pigeon possibly 
identical with one of the wild species living in Greece? To 
answer this question, we must first, as usual, turn to the Semitic 
world. 

That the dove was sacred to the goddess of nature, who was 
worshipped under various names in the cities of Syria, and whom 
the Greeks called Aphrodite, and that large flocks of pigeons 
were kept at her temples, are facts attested by several independent 
authorities. When Xenophon accompanied the army of the 
younger Cyrus, and passed through Syria, he found the inhabitants 
worshipping fishes and pigeons. Pigeons, says the pseudo-Lucian 
(De Syria Dea), were held so sacred at Hierapolis or Bambyce, 



256 THE PJGEOX 



that none dared even to touch one, and if any one did so acciden- 
tally, he was under a curse for the rest of the day ; so that pigeons, 
says our informant, were quite men's companions, entering the 
houses, and taking possession of the land. The same thing is 
said by Philo the Jew about Ascalon, the original seat of Aphro- 
dite Ourania, i.e., Astaroth : " There I found an innumerable 
quantity of pigeons in the streets and in every house, and when 
I inquired the reason, I was told that an ancient religious com- 
mandment forbade men to catch pigeons or use them for any 
profane purpose. Hence the bird has become so tame that it 
not only lives under the roof, but is the table-companion of man, 
and is very bold and impudent." The pigeons that flew in and 
out of the temple of the Paphian goddess in Cyprus, and even 
perched on her sacred image, are so well known that no special 
proof need be given. 

Now as the Astarte of Ascalon was very early transplanted to 
Cythera and Lacedsemon, and the Semitic Aphrodite in general 
to Corinth and many other places on the coast of Greece, while 
Cyprus early became the goal of Greek voyagers and colonists ; 
one would think that the favourite bird and symbol of that god- 
dess would have accompanied her to Greece, and become an 
object of domestication in her temples at an equally early period. 
But not one tradition points to such a thing. In Homer's Hymn 
to Aphrodite her doves are never mentioned, though he describes 
the goddess entering her perfumed temple, being anointed with 
divine oil by the Graces, adorned with golden ornaments and 
clothed in splendid garments; and even when she leaves the 
temple she merely " soars up to windy heaven." In the shorter 
hymns, not one of the many epithets given to the goddess alludes 
to her doves. In an ode by Sappho, her chariot is drawn by 
swift sparrows, not by doves or swans. A couplet quoted from 
the same poetess speaks of doves letting their wings droop, but 
without allusion to any goddess. In all the rest of lyric poetry, 
down to Pindar, as far as it exists, the dove is never mentioned. 

This late appearance of a bird that afterwards played so promi- 
nent a part in art, religion, and human life, is evidently the result 
of a similar course of events in Syria, Palestine, and Cyprus. 



THE PIGEON. 257 



There too the tame pigeon is not very ancient, and only became 
the symbol of Astarte and Ashera when invasions and commerce 
had caused the worship of these goddesses to be incorporated 
with that of the intrinsically similar Semiramis of Central Asia. 
Semiramis was imagined as a dove, and the name signified a dove. 
" In the Syrian language Semiramis is named after the dove, 
which since that time has been worshipped as a goddess by all the 
inhabitants of Syria," says Diodorus. Semiramis, immediately 
after her birth at Ascalon, was exposed by her mother, the fish- 
goddess Derketo ; she was fed by doves, and brought up by the 
shepherd Simmas, who named her after himself. She then 
appeared at Nineveh as a glorious female warrior, and finally 
transformed herself into a dove and flew away with others of her 
kind. Another legend says that an immense egg fell from heaven 
into the Euphrates, that fish rolled it on shore, doves hatched it, 
and out of it came forth Venus, who was afterwards called the dea 
Syria; and that hence the Syrians held fish and doves sacred, 
and would not eat them. We see, then, that the worship of 
doves came from the Euphrates to Western Asia, and with it the 
conception of the Goddess of Nature as a dove. 

In the Old Testament the first tolerably reliable mention of the 
tame pigeon is found in the pseudo-Isaiah lx. 8 ; " Who are these 
that fly as a cloud, and as the doves to their windows? " This part 
of Isaiah was written during the Captivity ; and it is at this time, 
after the Babylonian conquest, that the adoption of pigeon-breed- 
ing in Western Asia, and of that gentle bird into the Syro-Phoeni- 
cian cult may have gradually taken place. If the allusions to the 
dove in Solomon's Song can only refer to the tame pigeon, which 
we leave undetermined, then that poem also, whose age is quite 
uncertain, cannot have a higher date assigned to it. According 
to Josephus (Wars, v. 4, 4) there were " many towers of tame 
pigeons " in the later royal palace at Jerusalem, which was 
destroyed in the general conflagration. 

From the Syrian courts, in a roundabout way, the domestic 
pigeon reached the Greeks about the beginning of the fifth century 
B.C. This is proved by a remarkable statement, which, however, 
must be rightly understood. Charon of Lampsacus, the precursor 

17 



258 THE PIGEON. 



of Herodotus, says, that at the time when the Persian fleet under 
Mardonius was wrecked while rounding the promontory of Athos, 
two years before the battle of Marathon, white doves appeared in 
Greece, where until then they had been unknown. What is 
meant by these " white doves " ? — nothing but domestic and temple 
pigeons of superior race, for wild pigeons were distinguished by 
being black, dun, grey, or ash-coloured, and named accordingly, 
not only by the Greeks, but in the languages of the other Aryan 
nations of Europe. Herodotus expressly calls the doves of 
Dodona black; although he explains both the black feathers and 
the whole mystery of the pigeon-oracle in the rationalistic manner 
of the more modern time. The Greek name peleia is derived from 
the adjective pelos, grey, as the ancients themselves say ; it is the 
same word as the Latin palumbus, palumba. The Czech, Polish, 
and Russian names for the wild dove, siwdk, sizidk, are derived in 
the same way from siwy, sizyi, grey, raven-grey ; the French biset, 
stock-dove, from bis, blackish. In like manner the word dove 
(Germ. Taube, Goth, dubo, A. -Saxon deaf, Old Norse daufr) is 
connected with the adjective daubs, deaf, dumb, blind, dusky, 
dark-coloured ; for which last meaning the Celtic language affords 
a welcome confirmation in the Old Irish dubh, black, dub, ink, 
Dubis, Doubs, the black river. On the other hand, the Asiatic 
dove sacred to Aphrodite is always styled the white, leuke, alba, 
Candida, because of its delicate white feathers. Martial, in an 
epigram written on a toga which he had received as a present, 
praises its whiteness and compares it to the lily, the privet-blossom, 
ivory, the swan, the Paphian dove, and the pearl. Silius Italicus, 
partly differing from Herodotus, and probably following Pindar, 
relates that two doves sprang from the lap of Thebe, one of which 
flew to Chaonia and prophesied from the top of the oak at 
Dodona, while the other, white with white wings (so the first 
must have been black or grey), crossed the sea to Africa and there, 
as Cytherea's bird, founded the Ammonian oracle. So the "white 
doves " mentioned by Charon must have been tame pigeons that 
escaped from the wrecked ships of the Persian fleet to the land at 
Athos, and fell into the hands of the inhabitants. But as Hero- 
dotus tells us that the Persians abominated the Assyrio-Babylonian 



THE PIGEON, 259 



white doves as inimical to the sun, and would not suffer them in 
their country, it must have been Phoenician, Cyprian, and Cilician 
sailors that carried with them images of their goddess, and also 
her sacred doves. Half a century later we find the pigeon under 
the name oiperistera (which perhaps originated in that northern 
region), completely domesticated among the Athenians, who had 
active commercial and political relations with Thrace ; and, as in 
the East, it is used as a swift messenger. The ^Eginete Tauro- 
sthenes, who lived at that time, sent the news of his victory at 
Olympia to his father by means of a pigeon, which reached ^Egina 
the same day. From many passages in the works of the poets, 
and from plastic representations, we know that from the above 
period doves were inseparably connected with Aphrodite, being 
kept in her temples, and offered, either alive or in marble, at her 
shrine. There was also much significance in gifts of pigeons on 
the part of lovers. 

It is probable that Italy first became acquainted with the domestic 
pigeon by means of the temple at Eryx in Sicily. On that moun- 
tain, an ancient seat of Phoenician and Carthaginian culture, there 
lived flocks of white and coloured pigeons, sacred to the great 
goddess there worshipped, and participating in the festivals cele- 
brated in her honour. When the goddess departed for Africa on 
the day of the Anagogia, her doves vanished also ; and when, 
after nine days, the first dove re-appeared, the goddess was also 
near, and the noisy joy-feast of the Katagogia commenced. During 
the gloomy interval the pigeons were probably kept shut up. The 
Sicilian Greeks, as we infer from the Latin name columba, 
columbus, called the bird, when they first saw it, kolymbos, 
kolymba, diver, waterfowl ; for the wild doves that inhabited the 
cliffs, the rocks, and the summits of high trees were dark in com- 
parison with the waterfowls, which were distinguished by the 
adjective white ; for example, the swan — Old High Germ, alplz, 
A. -Sax. alfet, Old Norse dipt, Slav, lebedi, all identical with the 
Latin albus, Greek alphos. The Greek Kolymbos has an analogon 
in the Lithu. gulbe, and Old Irish gall, swan ; and as it meant the 
white waterfowl, it was natural to call by it the white bird of 
Aphrodite, who herself was a pelagian goddess and therefore 



26o THE PIGEON. 



loved the swan also. In Italy the beautiful bird gradually became 
familiar, and its propagation a common custom. " At first," says 
Varro, " we used the name columbcz without distinction for male 
and female, and only later, when the bird had become common 
in our houses, did we learn to distinguish the columbus from the 
columba." He tells us that one species of native dove, the genus 
saxatile, rock-dove (Italian sassajuolo), was kept half-tamed in the 
villas ; these birds inhabited the highest towers and pinnacles of 
the country-house, coming and going, and seeking their food in 
the open country. " The other kind," adds Varro, " is tamer, and 
lives only on the food given to it ; it is generally white, while the 
wild pigeons are of mixed colour without any white." This com- 
pletely domesticated white pigeon — evidently the Cyprio-Syrian 
bird which came originally from Babylon — was often put together 
with the native grey pigeons, and thus a cross-breed was formed, 
miscellum tertium genus, of which frequently as many as 5,000 
birds were kept in a large pigeon-house, called peristereon, or 
peristero-tropheion. Galen was acquainted with the two kinds, the 
house-pigeon and the field-pigeon, and adds that in his native 
place, in the neighbourhood of Pergamus in Asia Minor, towers 
were built in the country, into which the latter species were enticed, 
and there maintained. This half domestication of the wild pigeon 
probably existed in very early times, not only in Asia Minor, but 
in the East in general. The Mosaic law relating to the sacrifice 
of pigeons proves that in Canaan, where doves are so common, 
places for keeping the colwnba livid, and also the turtle-dove, must 
have existed very early, for the Hebrews never sacrificed wild 
animals. In the legend of Noah's ark, the dove which returned 
and the raven which stayed away seem meant not only to express 
the difference in colour, but the contrast between wild and tame. 
So in Egypt. It is true that in the coronation-scene (Wilkinson, 
second series, pi. 76) the four pigeons that fly to the four quarters 
of the globe as a symbol of universal dominion can only be 
meant for wild birds ; but the domestic scene described by 
Brugsch represents pigeons being actually fed. It must not be 
forgotten that the accompanying inscriptions are said to mean 
" the goose is fed ; " " the duck receives food ; " " the pigeon 



THE PIGEON. 2&\ 



fetches its food ; " the last expression being exactly suited to the 
shy yet greedy field-pigeon. But the pigeon of Semiramis, that 
of Ascalon, the coloured bird which is the parent of our common 
species, cannot have existed in Egypt at such an early period, else 
it would have appeared earlier than it did in the civilized countries 
of Asia and Europe. 

From Italy the domestic pigeon overspread Europe. The 
Celtic names (Old Irish colum, Welsh and Old Cornish colom, 
Breton kouh?i, klo??i), as well as the Slavic names (golqbz, etc.), 
were all borrowed from the Latin. The image of the dove was 
very early adopted by Christianity as a symbol; it was a pure 
gentle bird, innocent and without guile; the Holy Ghost descended 
in the shape of a dove ; and in that shape, when a true believer 
died, his soul ascended to heaven. Figures of doves are fre- 
quently seen in the most ancient Christian catacombs ; and in the 
mediaeval legends of the saints the dove is the outward sign of 
the influence of the Heavenly Spirit. When Chlodwig, King of the 
Franks, was baptized at Rheims, the oil for anointing him was 
brought to St. Remigius by a dove from heaven. From the time 
of the Fathers it was a common belief that pigeons had no gall. 
The Pope gave away images of the Dove as he did the Golden 
R-Ose. In the eyes of the primitive European nations the grey 
pigeon, which lived in wild solitudes, was a gloomy prophetic bird, 
and perhaps a bird of death ; afterwards, a symbol of the contrast 
between heathenism and Christianity, appeared the graceful, gentle, 
white pigeon from abroad, living with men, and so tame that it 
would eat from the hand. In the West, however, it was always a 
domestic creature, whose droppings and feathers were made use 
of, and whose flesh was eaten like that of geese, ducks, and fowls ; 
but in the congregations of the Anatolian Church, in accordance 
with old Eastern ideas, it was the object of religious reverence 
and superstition. In Moscow and other Russian towns flocks of 
tame pigeons are kept and fed by merchants and others ; and to 
kill, pluck, and eat one of these sacred birds would be considered 
a kind of sacrilege, just as it was at Hierapolis and Ascalon in 
the time of Xenophon and Philo. At Venice, a half-Greek city, 
swarms of pigeons still inhabit the cupolas of St. Mark's, and the 



262 THE PIGEON. 



roof of the Doge's Palace. They fly down and strut about the 
Piazza undisturbed, and at stated hours are fed at the public cost. 
Our present European breed of pigeons is, indeed, still divided 
into the two branches described by Varro ; but in consequence 
of cross-breeding the kinds and varieties of the true domestic 
pigeon have multiplied immeasurably, as every pigeon-show and 
zoological garden can prove. Travellers report that in the East, 
even now, there are immense pigeon houses, the principal object 
of which is the production of the pigeon dung so invaluable for 
manure; it is possible that these pigeons are the same columba 
livia, with the same form and size as those mentioned by Galen, 
and which were supposed to have existed in Egypt and Palestine. 
The Mohammedans are also fond of keeping pigeons in mosques 
and sanctuaries at Mecca and elsewhere, for they, like the Oriental 
Christians, look upon the dove as a sacred bird ; it was a dove 
that whispered all that it had seen and heard into the ear of the 
Prophet. But at no time, either in the East or in the West, has 
the pigeon ever attained such importance in life as the domestic 
fowl (note 69). 

There are three other domestic birds which came from Asia to 
Greece in historic times; quite as novel to Europe as the two 
already mentioned, and, like them, brought to the West in the 
Greek age to satisfy the desire for wider and richer experience 
excited by higher stages of civilization. They are the Peacock^ 
the Gtiinea-fowl % and the Pheasant. 



THE PEACOCK. 

The peacock was less immediately useful than the pigeon, but 
it was more calculated by the proud display of its magnificent 
plumage to delight the multitude and increase the splendour of 
rich houses and royal courts. Varro says it was considered the 
most beautiful of all birds. The road along which it came to the 
ancient civilized nations can still be recognised, at least in the 
principal points. The peacock was a native of India, and — like 
shining gold, glittering jewels, white ivory, and black ebony — 
was one of the most admired and envied productions of that 
distant land of wonders. There Alexander the Great found the 
peacock in a wild state in a wood full of unknown trees, and, 
struck by the beauty of the bird, threatened anybody who should 
kill one for sacrifice with the heaviest punishment. In India, 
then, the peacock lived wild in the woods, and thence by means 
of Phoenician marine traffic it was brought to the Mediterranean, 
as is proved not only by a particular passage pointing to the com- 
mencement of the tenth century B.C., but also by a comparison of 
names. The ships of King Solomon, equipped in the harbours 
of Edom, brought peacocks on their voyage home from Ophir, 
together with other valuables ; in the Hebrew text the birds are 
called tukkiyim. This word is no other than the Sanskrit fi&kt, 
called in Old Tamulic togei. So Ophir was situated on the coast 
of Malabar, or if it was only an intermediate emporium, the 
costly wares mentioned came from Malabar to Ophir; and the 
extraordinary peafowl, together with the gay-coloured parrots and 
amusing apes, were thought not unworthy to adorn the court of 
the wisest of kings. But the bird must have long remained a 
rarity ; it was costly to obtain, and probably was not entirely 



264 THE PEACOCK. 



tamed nor easy to keep and propagate in a new climate ; as 
we conclude from the slowness of its extension towards the West, 
and the difficulty with which it was kept and bred at Athens, even 
at the close of the fifth century. The Greek name tads (which 
in Attica was quite exceptionally pronounced tahos) proves it to 
have been introduced to the Greeks from Semitic Asia. Probably 
the first place at which peafowls were kept on Greek soil was the 
Heraeum of Samos, for the legend of that temple makes it the 
spot where peacocks first originated, and whence they were in- 
troduced into other countries. What caused the bird to be con- 
sidered the favourite of Hera was the brilliant " eyes " on its tail 
feathers : those eyes were stars, and Hera was the Goddess of 
Heaven, not only in the borrowed Samian, but in the original 
Argive cult. Beside her temple flowed the brook Asterion, the 
star-brook, whose three daughters had been Hera's nurses ; on 
its banks grew the herb Asterion, the star-wort, which was offered 
up to the goddess ; and the peacock, the star-bird, when once it 
became known, was very naturally adopted into the worship of 
Hera. Quite as naturally arose the various forms of the myth : 
how the all-seeing Argus, the spy upon the Moon-goddess lo, was 
changed into a peacock after being killed by Argeiphontes ; or 
else, how the peacock with its flowery plumage sprang out of the 
crimson blood of the dead Argus, spreading its wings like the 
oars of a ship; or again, how Juno set the hundred eyes of Argus 
on the feathers of the bird. Though legend thus derives the bird 
from Samos and not from India, we cannot suppose that its adop- 
tion into the worship of Hera took place in ''immemorial times" as 
Movers will have it ; we know that it is in the nature of religious 
institutions and the legends attached to them, to ascribe to them- 
selves a life without a beginning. When the later temple in 
Samos — which Herodotus declared to be the largest Greek temple 
of his time — was completed, a gift of the first pair of peafowls 
was perhaps made to the temple by some rich merchant who 
traded with Syria and the Red Sea, or by some pious Samian who 
had emigrated to a Syrian or Egyptian seaport. And if that pair 
died, the priests would procure another, which would live and 
multiply, attracting pilgrims by their novelty and swelling the 



THE PEACOCK. 265 



revenues and reputation of the temple ; the island was so proud of 
possessing the rare and beautiful birds, that the image of a pea- 
cock was stamped on its coins. Yet the bird can scarcely have 
reached Samos by the time of Polycrates (540 B.C.), for if the 
poets Ibycus and Anacreon, who lived at the court of that tyrant, 
had ever set eyes on a peacock, they would surely have men- 
tioned it in their poems ; and later authors, like Athenseus, would 
not have neglected to cite them and preserve them for posterity 
(note 70); and reports about the bird, and even the bird itself, would 
certainly have reached Athens. But the fact is, that the peacock 
is not found at Athens before the middle of the fifth century, and 
even then it is a great curiosity and the object of extreme admir- 
ation. Perhaps the revolt of Samos from the Athenian hegemony, 
440 B.C., and the invasion and subjugation of the island by Pericles, 
afforded the victors an opportunity of carrying peacocks from the 
Temple of Hera to Athens ; though Thucydides only mentions the 
surrender of the ships and payment of the war expenses. Many 
passages from the Comic poets, and two epitomes of a logos by 
the orator Antiphon on peacocks, give a striking picture of the 
excitement caused by the brilliant bird on its first appearance 
among the curious, novelty-loving Athenians, and show how the 
eagerness to see and possess it was only heightened by its great 
price and the difficulty of breeding it. The above-named oration 
informs us that there lived at Athens a rich bird-fancier named 
Demos the son of Pyrilampes : he must have been rich, for he 
equipped a trireme destined for Cyprus, and the Great King 
presented him with a golden goblet, possibly because he had pre- 
sented the monarch with a peacock. This Demos was so over- 
run with curious visitors coming from distant parts, such as 
Lacedsemon and Thessaly, to see his peafowl and if possible to 
obtain some of their eggs, that he appointed one day every month, 
the day of the new moon, on which every one was admitted, on 
other days he refused all visitors ; " and this," continues Antiphon, 
" has gone on for more than thirty years " (note 71). In fact, his 
father Pyrilampes had also kept an omitho-trophia, and was said 
to have assisted his friend the great Pericles in his love affairs by 
secretly sending peacocks to the fair ones whom that statesman 



266 THE PEACOCK. 



was wooing. Antiphon goes on to say, that it was not possible to 
propagate the birds in the city because they flew away, and to 
clip their wings would spoil their beauty, which lay not in their 
form but in their feathers. For this reason they long continued to 
be so scarce that a pair of them was valued at 10,000 drachmae. 
"Is it not madness," says Anaxandrides, one of the Comic 
poets, " to keep peacocks, and spend on them sums that would 
suffice to purchase works of art ? " And in a comedy by Eupolis 
we read : " What, all that money ? Why, I should not spend 
that if I had hares' milk and peacocks ! " The Comic poets do 
not fail to attribute the value set on the possession of peacocks 
to their rarity ; for in themselves, says a passage in Strattis, pea- 
cocks and tomfooleries are equally worthless. In the course 
of the fourth century, when Athens retained the hegemony, if 
not in politics, yet in manners and taste, peacocks must have 
spread more and more from that city among the other Greeks. 
" Once," says Antiphanes, " it was something grand to possess 
even one pair of peafowl, now they are commoner than quails ! " 
which no doubt was an exaggeration. After Alexander the 
Great, with the spread of Greek dominion and colonization, the 
peacock penetrated to the cities and gardens of inland Asia. 
Though Babylon was said to be rich in beautifully coloured 
peafowls, and though in itself it is not improbable that a bird 
which King Solomon had procured from distant lands should 
have become frequent in a city so closely connected by war and 
commerce with the Semitic coast-lands on the Mediterranean; 
yet the circumstance that the Asiatic names for the peacock are 
all borrowed from the Greek is in favour of the supposition that 
the Greek dominion — by Re-migration, a thing that may be ob- 
served in other cases — first rendered the bird popular in the wide 
continent. That Suidas and Clement of Alexandria call it a 
Median bird is as much to the purpose as our calling two 
American products Indian-corn and Turkey-cock in England, 
and Turkis/i-whesit and Calcutta-coc\. in Germany. 

The Greeks had called the peacock tamos, tawon, tahos ; the 
Romans called it pavus or pavo, pavonis. This substitution of 
p for / reminds one of the similar change of tadtnor into palma, 



THE PEACOCK. 267 



which we explained by a supposed difference in Semitic dialects. 
Is it possible that the peacock also passed to the Latin-speaking 
races direct from Phoenician-Carthaginian hands ? A remark in 
Eustathius, that " the peacock was sacred among the inhabitants 
of Libya, and whoever hurt it was punished," is too isolated, and 
of no value in so late an author ; natural history knows nothing 
of peafowl in Africa, nor religious history of there being any at 
the Temple of Ammon, or that of the Carthaginian Juno. The 
eagle and peacock on the coins of Leptis Magna are nothing 
but apotheoses of Augustus and Livia (or Julia), who are thus 
deified into a Jupiter and Juno. However, the possibility that 
this product of the voyages to Ophir (like ebur, barrus, fialmd) 
reached the coast of Italy direct from Carthage, Sicily, and 
Sardinia, cannot be denied. 

Peacocks' feathers, and tufts and fans made of them, or hats 
bedizened with them, are as welcome to primitive man as glass 
and amber beads, and for them he will gladly exchange his sheep 
and skins. When Ennius pretends that Homer appeared to him 
in a dream and told him that he remembered having been 
changed into a peacock, this was no doubt a Pythagorean idea 
adopted by the poet when at Tarentum ; as the symbol of the 
starry firmament and the Goddess of Heaven and Earth, the 
peacock was the very bird to have housed the soul of Homer, 
for he too was imagined to be a native of Samos, as Pythagoras 
was. Paints, pavo, like other names of birds, appears as a 
Roman cognomen in the Republican time, so that the bird itself 
was then no novelty in Italy. Varro mentions one Fircellius 
Pavo, in whom we should recognise a Sabine by his name Fir- 
cellius {firms — hircus), even if he had not also that of Reatinus. 
A creature that had been an object of luxury in Athens must 
have prospered among the later Romans in as much greater 
measure as their luxury and wealth exceeded those of the Attic 
Greeks. The orator Hortensius, the contemporary of Cicero, 
who was at the head of Roman extravagance in other respects 
also, was the first who regaled his guests with roasted peacock, 
which happened at the magnificent banquet given by him on his 
nomination as augur. Though the flesh of peafowl, especially 



268 THE PEACOCK. 



that of an old bird, is not very eatable, his example was soon 
generally imitated. Cicero writes in a letter, "Now mark the 
impudence: I actually gave a dinner to Hirtius, and without 
peacock, too ; " and Horace reproaches his contemporaries with 
preferring peacock to capon, because the rare bird costs gold and 
spreads a gorgeous tail, as if that made its flavour any better ; 
the true motive of this " because " being the Romans' proud 
consciousness of possessing unlimited means, and their consequent 
self-indulgence. Fly-flaps made of peacocks' tails were as common 
at rich men's tables as golden dishes and cups set with gems. 
The peacock being thus generally desired, the breeding of the 
bird in whole flocks soon became an object of industrial hus- 
bandry, which at first was not practised without difficulty. The 
smaller islands surrounding Italy were arranged as peacock-islands, 
probably imitating a Greek practice ; thus, in Varro's time, M. 
Piso stocked the Isle of Planasia, now Pianosa, with his peacocks. 
The advantages of such sea-surrounded peacock-farms are ex- 
plained by Columella : the peacock, not being able to fly either 
far or high, could not leave the island, yet lived there in perfect 
freedom, and picked up the greater part of its own food ; the 
hens, being free, brought up their young with natural care ; no 
guard was necessary, no thief or dangerous animal to be feared ; 
and the keeper needed only to collect the flocks around the farm 
at stated hours by strewing a little food, in order to review and 
count the birds. There being only a limited number of suitable 
islands, peacock-farms were also laid out on the mainland at 
great expense. The ancient authors describe minutely the whole 
arrangement, the necessary care, and the various operations con- 
nected with such breeding-places. Towards the end of the second 
century a.d., Rome was so full of peafowl that, as Antiphanes 
had prophetically asserted, they really were commoner than quails ; 
at the same time new specimens from India were furnished by 
way of the Red Sea, and probably also by land across Persia. 
In Lucian's dialogue " Navigium," one of the speaker's wishes, 
supposing he suddenly became rich, was to have a peacock from 
India for his table ; proving that the bird was still procured from 
that country. 



THE PEACOCK. 269 



In all the European languages the name of the peacock begins 
with the Latin p and not with the Greek /, a clear proof that the 
bird was introduced into barbaric Europe, not from Greece or 
the East, but from the Apennine peninsula. Christianity adopted 
the peacock, as it did the dove, into its symbolism ; partly as 
an emblem of resurrection, because, according to the fantastic 
natural history of the time, the flesh of the peacock was said 
to be incorruptible, and partly as the image of heavenly glory, 
on account of the beauty of its exterior. In the latter connexion 
we need only remind our readers of the peacock-feathers in the 
wings of the angels in Hans Memling's celebrated picture of 
the Last Judgment, at Dantzig. On the other hand, that distrust 
of all sensuous beauty, peculiar to the negative genius of Chris- 
tianity, sharpened a sense of the gorgeous creature's imperfections : 

" Peacock has thief's artfulness, 
Devil's voice, and angel's dress," 

says Freidank's " Modesty; " and its ugly naked feet were pointed 
out as a warning to be humble. The name of Petitpas given to 
the peacock in the French "Renart," probably alludes to its 
stealthy thievish gait. For the rest, peacock -feathers were as 
exactly suited to barbaric taste as inlaid gems and everything 
that was glittering and striking. 

Peacocks' feathers were worn on the knight's helmet, and ia 
the form of wreaths on the necks of noble maidens ; and when 
the splendid garments of the sick King Amfortas, or the majestic 
costume of the terrible Kundrie la Sorciere, or that of King 
Gramoflanz, are described in " Parcival," there is never wanting, 
among other costly garments, the pfaewin or phawin /mot, namely, 
peacock-hat. That these peacock-hats came from England we 
learn from the above-named and other poems, and there too- 
must have been bred the birds that produced the material. 
Charlemagne had ordered peacocks and pheasants to be kept on 
his estates, and the custom seems to have been kept up at the 
castles of the Norman nobles in England. The ancient custom 
of serving up a roasted peacock in all the splendour of its plumage 
had not been lost, and was continued down to the sixteenth century.. 



270 THE PEACOCIC. 



Generally the lady of the house herself carried in the bird on a 
gold or silver dish amid the sound of trumpets, and the host 
carved it as King Arthur does at the Round Table in the "Lanzelot." 
The custom described in D'Aussy's " Histoire de la vie prive'e des 
Francais," of the half-mad vows sworn on the roasted peacock by 
French knights, the so-called voeux dupan, in which each tried to 
outdo the other, is traced by Grimm (R.A., p. 901) to Scandi- 
navian vows on the boar. This enthusiasm for the peacock began 
to cool towards the time of the Renaissance, and the bird gra- 
dually retired into the modest position which it holds to-day. It 
disappeared from the table together with many other meaningless 
shows in which a ruder age delighted ; for though the savage 
covers himself with natural objects, such as feathers and tinsel, a 
more educated taste despises all adornments that are not trans- 
formed by the moderating and adjusting hand of art, and raised 
above the sphere of the elementary. The peacock may yet strut 
in parks among other gay birds, although its harsh voice and 
the damage it causes are disproportionate to the pleasure de- 
rived from its contemplation; but peacock feathers have been 
driven farther and farther to the east, to the Tartars, the Russian 
coachmen, and the Chinese, who use them as signs of the highest 
rank ; they are only fit for the red-and-blue tattooed chieftain 
who girds them as a brilliant apron round his loins. 



THE GUINEA-FOWL. 

The guinea-fowl, Numida meleagris^ is, to our knowledge, first 
mentioned by Sophocles, who said in his tragedy of Meleagros, 
that on the other side of India electron (amber) flowed out of the 
tears of the birds that wept at the death of Meleager and were called 
by his name. The legend that the sisters of Meleager were 
changed into birds at the death of their mother and brother and 
the fail of their house may be very old, for Myth loves to express 
unbearable sorrow by a transformation into birds; but it is 
remarkable that so early as the time of Sophocles these birds 
were not spoken of as any native species, but as a distant and 
fabulous one, and were supposed to weep electron in some fan- 
tastic land lying beyond India. If we add that other legend, 
which says that the Meleagrides lived in the Electrian islands at 
the mouth of the Eridamus, which ^Eschylus places among the 
Iberians in the uttermost West, at the very spot where Phaethon 
fell, and the precious golden gum distils from the poplars into 
which his sisters the Heliades were changed ; it confirms our con- 
jecture that the common cock received his name of alektor from 
the sun, and from amber the stone of the sun ; and the guinea- 
fowl, the nearest relations of the cock, were equally children of 
the sun, and were imagined as dwelling in the far East where the 
sun rises, and in the far West where he sets, or rather at the point 
where east and west meet on the other side of India. Geographi- 
cally more exact, though still in a half-mythic manner, Mnaseas 
reports that there is in Africa a region called Sicyon, where the 
river Crathis flows out of a lake into the Atlantic Ocean ; there 
live the birds called meleagrides and penelopce (a gay-coloured, 
equally foreign species of duck), and there also is electron 



272 THE GUINEA-FOWL. 



made. The very same country, though under other names and 
with omission of the fabulous origin of amber, is pointed out in the 
" Periplus " of Scylax as the only place where guinea-fowls were 
to be found. " If one sails through the Pillars of Hercules, keep- 
ing Africa on his left hand, there opens, as far as the Cape of 
Hermes, a wide gulf called Kotes ; in the middle of this gulf lies 
the town of Pontion and a large reedy lake named Kephesias ; 
there live the birds called meleagrides, and nowhere else, except 
where they have been taken to from that place." And, in fact, 
North-west Africa, the country about Sierra Leone, Cape Verd, 
etc., is rich in guinea-fowl, though they are also not wanting in 
the east of that continent. Strabo and Diodorus report that an 
island in the Red Sea was inhabited by guinea-fowls; Captain 
Speke found them the "commonest of all feathered game " on his 
journey from Zanzibar to the sources of the Nile ; and Niebuhr 
says even of Arabia, " guinea-fowl are wild there, but at Tehania 
in the mountainous region so frequent that the boys pelt them 
with stones and bring them to the town to sell." We have no 
certain knowledge of the route by which these birds were first 
brought to Greece, whether from the west or the east of Africa, 
or why they were named after Meleager. Perhaps the first 
Greeks who actually saw these beautiful birds, near relations of 
the cock, and sprinkled all over with pearls or tears, thought of 
the blooming youth who had incurred his mother's curse as the 
departing Sun-god slain by Winter, and of his sisters as transformed 
into birds of the sun. Clytus of Miletus, a disciple of Aristotle, 
says that at the temple of the Parthenos (that is, Artemis, called 
by the Lerians Iokallis), on the small island of Leros, colonized 
by the Milesians, there were kept " ornithes meleagrides," which, 
from the full description that follows, must have been African 
guinea-fowls. It is not said how they came there, nor why they 
were sacred to the virgin goddess. As guinea-fowl are even 
braver and more quarrelsome than the Indian cock, mythical 
fancy probably saw in these birds the warlike Amazons, the 
hierodali of chaste Artemis; they had been the companions of 
Iokallis. "The Lerians know well," says iElian, "why those who 
worship the deity, but especially Artemis, deny themselves the flesh 



THE GUINEA-FOWL. 273 

of this bird." The pious legend of Leros asserted that no bird 
of prey dared to attack the sacred fowls. Iokallis may probably 
be identical with the Arcadian nymph Kallisto, the daughter of 
Artemis Kalliste, who stood together with Io in the Acropolis of 
Athens ; and perhaps this explains the otherwise unheard-of state- 
ment of Suidas that guinea-fowls were kept in the Acropolis. — 
Italy, lying nearer to the West African home of the guinea-fowl, 
might easily become acquainted with the bird by the marine traffic 
of the West, without any intervention of the Greeks ; perhaps for 
the first time during the Punic wars. The Latin names seem to 
point to such a possibility : Numidica, Africa aves, gallincz 
Africaner, Libycce, etc. 

In Varro's time guinea-fowls were still rare and consequently 
dear in Italy ; they were used for food because the Roman must 
put everything into his mouth, and the more a dish cost the 
greedier he was; there is no trace of religious reverence, or of 
any peep into the world of fancy. With the fall of the Roman 
Empire the ornamental bird also disappeared from the sphere of 
European life — for, as far as we can make out, it was unknown in 
the Middle Ages — till, after a thousand years, it reappeared among 
Europeans with the revival of ancient culture and the discoveries 
of the Portuguese along the coast of Africa. It was taken by the 
Portuguese and Spaniards, those nearest neighbours of the Numi- 
dians, to America, where it found a climate and scenery so 
suitable to its wants, that it now inhabits the forests of Central 
America in immense flocks which have altogether run wild. 



18 



THE PHEASANT. 

Judging from the name of the Pheasant — the bird of the river 
Phasis so famed in legend, and flowing through that magic land of 
Colchis to which in fabulous times the god-like heroes had sailed 
in the swift Argo — it is not unlikely that the Greeks became ac- 
quainted with it in the same century as with the cock and the guinea- 
fowl. The name was given to the bird by men who still conceived 
of the world no otherwise than as in mythic transformation, but 
who already began to sport with the myth. The pheasant's native 
home was probably the woods of Hyrcania, south of the Caspian 
Sea, whence it became known to the Greek colonists on the Black 
Sea, and later to the European Greeks. It is not alluded to in 
literature before Aristophanes. For the reproof addressed by 
Solon to Croesus, when the latter displayed himself in all his royal 
splendour, namely, that "cooks, pheasants, and peacocks were far 
more beautiful, nature herself having adorned them," cannot be 
accepted as a historic fact, and therefore we made no use of it in 
speaking of the domestic fowl or of the pea-fowl. But a verse in 
Aristophanes — 

" Not if you gave me thepkaszans that Leogoras breeds ! " 

shows that in that poet's lifetime pheasants were a costly luxury at 
Athens. Aristotle in his Natural History now and then speaks of 
the pheasant in a. manner which shows that the sight of the bird 
was not unfamiliar either to him or his readers. A passage in the 
writings of the Egyptian king Ptolemy Euergetes II., preserved 
in the works of Athenaeus, affords further historico-geographical 
explanation. That king, speaking of the animals kept in the palace 
at Alexandria, says of the pheasants, " These birds, which are 
called tetaroi, were not only introduced from Media, but have 



THE PHEASANT. 275 



so multiplied by breeding, that they are used for food, and 
their flesh is considered delicious " (the text is corrupt, but the 
sense is not to be mistaken). From this we see that Alexandria 
also received its pheasants from Media, that is, from the South 
Caspian countries, and their true name of tetaroi was identical 
with that used in the Medic language, as is proved by the modern 
Persic tedyrev, and the synonymous Old Slavic tetrevi> teterevi, tetria, 
or tetere, adopted from the Persic. The word runs on through 
Eastern Europe from nation to nation, but is there applied — there 
being no pheasants — to one of the large native birds, the bustard, 
heath-cock, grouse, and latterly the turkey. The Scandinavian 
name, Swed. tjader, Dan. tuir, which is wanting in the other 
Teutonic tongues, was borrowed from the Finnic tetri, and this 
in turn from the Lithuano-Lettic, teterva, tettera. That the 
Lithuanians and the Slavs had borrowed it from their ancient 
neighbours to the south, the Scythian-Sarmatian Medes, is 
rendered probable by the reasons and circumstances which cause 
one language to borrow from another, such as conquest, hunting, 
commerce, religion, and also the interchange of fables relating to 
animals, in which the names as well as the story are repeated 
from nation to nation. The Greek tetraon, tetrax, etc., can hardly 
be a native word, but is derived from Asia, in the same way as 
the Latins derived their tetrao from the Greek. It will be easily 
understood, as the Romans practised the breeding of birds in 
aviaries and parks to such an enormous extent, that the phasianus, 
also called tetrao. t played a chief part at Roman banquets ; in the 
edict of Diocletian a fixed market price is set on the phasianus 
pastus (fattened), the phasianus agrestis (wild), and the hen-pheasant 
respectively. Pheasants were also kept in Charlemagne's villas, 
and in consequence the beautiful, highly-valued bird was preserved, 
not only in royal pheasantries, but generally all through the Middle 
Ages, and now lives in many countries in a state of perfect 
freedom ; so that Europe, into which the bird was introduced with 
some difficulty, has become its second fatherland. The two 
magnificent varieties of the common Western Asiatic pheasant, the 
gold and the silver pheasant, now admired in aristocratic parks 
and zoological gardens, became known to us after the discovery of 



276 THE PHEASANT, 



the sea-passage to India, and were brought to Europe in single 
specimens from their native country, China. (Dureau de la Malle 
imagines from Pliny's words : " Phasiance. in Colchis geminas ex 
pluma auris submittunt subriguntque " — that these birds existed 
in Colchis at a much earlier period.) Cuvier believed that the 
Egyptian Phoenix, which appeared every 500 years, was the 
beautiful gold pheasant, — a coarse materializing of a mythic symbol 
or cosmogonic-periodologic fancy, such as we often meet with 
in works of rationalists and natural philosophers, when they try 
to explain miracles, primitive history, and the like. 



GOOSE. DUCK. 

While the number of mammalia that man has tamed and made 
companions of has only slightly increased in historical times, the 
farms and settlements of men have become enriched, at a com- 
paratively late period, with various tame birds, among which the 
domestic fowl is the most important. Bird and cattle-breeding are 
to a certain extent opposed to one another. It is not where wide 
plains fertilized by copious droppings stretch in immeasurable 
corn-fields and green meadows, and are bordered by thick forests, 
but in the sunny districts of more restricted horticulture, where 
farm stands close to farm, and hedge succeeds to hedge — it is here 
that the winged tribe peck and flutter about the human habita- 
tion, forming a not-to-be-undervalued source of sustenance and 
income in the system of the household. Thus in Europe the 
Romance nations are, in accordance with their habitat and tradi- 
tion, the bird-breeding, bird-eating peoples ; the Germans, on the 
contrary, feed principally on the flesh and milk of their cattle. 
France, at a moderate calculation, possesses above a hundred 
million fowls, and exports to England yearly above four hundred 
million eggs. In southern countries the only meat that the traveller 
tastes, often for months together, ana that the native peasant regales 
himself with on feast-days, is a fowl roasted or boiled with polenta. 
The taming of the Goose and the Duck is far more ancient than 
that of the birds hitherto mentioned; and, what is more, they 
were not introduced from Asia, but have been reclaimed from the 
wild native species. The name of the duck was the same in all the 
kindred races of Europe : Latin anas, anafis, Greek nessa, Doric 
nassa (for natia), A. -Saxon ened, Old Norse ond, Old Cornish hoet, 
Lith. antis, O. Slav, qty, Russ. ut-ka, etc. As for "goose, gander," 



278 GOOSE. DUCK. 



it runs through the whole Indo-European group, from the Old Irish 
getdh, ged (also goss) in the extreme West, to the Sanskrit hansas, 
hansi in the extreme East. It would be rash to conclude from this 
that the goose was a tame domestic animal among the primitive 
Aryan stock before the Great Migration ; it was doubtless well- 
known and much sought after on the lakes and streams, and in the 
swampy lowlands, as it is now among the nomads and half-nomads 
of Central Asia. Where it was still abundant and easy to obtain, 
there was no necessity for breeding it artificially in confinement ; 
and so long as men's manner of life was unsettled, a bird that 
takes thirty days to hatch, and a proportionate length of time to 
rear its young, was unsuitable to the economy of a pastoral people. 
But when comparatively stationary settlements were formed on 
the shores of lakes, the young birds could easily be fetched down 
from their nests by boys, have their wings dipt, and be brought 
up in the household ; if they died the attempt was repeated, until 
it finally succeeded, especially as the wild goose is, comparatively 
speaking, one of the easiest birds to tame. As it does not breed 
in the south of Europe, but only migrates into the Mediterra- 
nean lands in autumn with its young ready-fledged, the process 
was more practicable in Central Europe than in the classic lands ; 
and as these have but few large sheets of water, the wild goose is 
not nearly so frequent or accessible there as in the regions about 
the mouth of the Rhine, in Mecklenburg, Pomerania, and Scan- 
dinavia. By the Greeks the goose was considered a graceful bird, 
admired for its beauty, and an elegant present for favoured 
friends. In the Odyssey, Penelope has a little flock of twenty 
geese, in which she takes much pleasure, as we learn from the 
beautiful passage in which she relates her dream to her disguised 
husband. Here the geese appear as domestic animals, kept 
more for the pleasure the sight of them affords than for any 
profit they might bring. So, in the Edda, Gudrun keeps geese, 
which scream when their mistress laments over the corpse of 
Sigurd. At the same time, the Greeks valued geese as careful 
guardians of the house ; on the grave of a good housewife was 
placed the figure of a goose as a tender tribute to her quality of 
— vigilance ! 



GOOSE. 279 



Among the Romans perfectly white geese were carefully 
selected and used for breeding, so that in course of time a white 
and tamer species was produced, which differed considerably from 
the grey wild goose and its direct descendants. In ancient as in 
modern Italy the goose was not so commonly found on small farms 
as in the North, partly because the necessary water was scarce, and 
partly because of the damage she caused to the young vegeta- 
tion. But numerous flocks of this bird cackled in the huge goose- 
pens {chenoboscd) of breeders and proprietors of villas ; there the 
enormous liver that made the mouth of the gourmand water 
was produced by forced fattening — an artificial disease which was 
poor thanks for their saving of the Capitol. The use of goose 
feathers for stuffing beds or cushions was foreign to early anti- 
quity ; the later Romans first learned the practice from the Celts 
and Germans. In Pliny's time whole flocks of geese were driven 
from Belgium to Italy, particularly from the land of the Morini, 
who inhabited the Belgian coasts; the delicate white feathers 
which came from that country were celebrated, and are said to 
have belonged to a species of goose called gantce (the dental in 
the word is specifically Celtic, though it is also found in the 
neighbouring Low German dialects, as gander, etc., as well as in 
the O. H. Germ, ganzo). This species was no domestic bird, 
but a wild kind, and the feathers procured from it fetched so 
high a price, that in distant military stations whole cohorts of 
Roman soldiers would disperse over the country in quest of it. 
Pillows stuffed with goose feathers were an innovation at which 
true Romans shook their heads : " We have now arrived at such 
a pitch of effeminacy," adds Pliny, " that even men cannot lie 
down to rest without such an apparatus." Even to the present 
day, feather-beds are more characteristic of the North, being un- 
suitable to the warm South. The ancients were also unacquainted 
with another use of the goose-feather, that of an instrument for 
writing. The first quill-pens were used at the commencement of 
the Middle Ages, in the time of the Ostrogoth Theoderic. It is 
now supplanted by the steel-pen, so that there are three great 
periods of such instruments — the earliest lasting from the begin- 
ning of the art of writing among the Egyptians to the fall of the 



280 GOOSE. DUCK. 



Roman Empire, being that of the split reed, used by Thucydides 
and Tacitus ; the second, that of the quill-pen, with which Dante 
and Voltaire, Goethe, Hegel, and Humboldt wrote ; and the third, 
that of the steel-pen of the nineteenth century, with which leading 
articles and feuilletons are rapidly thrown off, to be sent to press 
before the ink is dry, and printed by steam. As will be seen, the 
periods of the instruments of writing do not coincide with those 
of the material upon which men wrote and do write 



In the domestication of birds, antiquity struck out paths in 
different directions, which have not been followed up since, and 
arrived at results which the modern world has allowed to fall into 
neglect. In Egypt, as the monuments show, a large water-bird, 
which we indefinitely call a heron, had become the tame com- 
panion of man ; in Rome the crane, stork, swan, and, of smaller 
birds, the turdus, perdix, and coturnix (thrush, partridge, quail), 
etc., had become objects of breeding and taming, and, according 
to the fashion, were now valued, now despised, as a dish for the 
table. And in the "Leges Barbarorum " (the Salic, Alamannic, etc.), 
the birds above named, and others whose names are difficult to 
explain, are still reckoned as domestic poultry, and penalties 
imposed on stealing them. But the Church forbade the eating of 
storks (as well as of beavers, hares, and wild horses ; see Pope 
Zachary's letter to St. Boniface, 751), so that in the latter part of 
the Middle Ages the domestication of birds was limited to geese, 
ducks, and hens, and it was left to the hunter, who found a grand 
field in the immense and thinly peopled forests of Central Europe, 
to provide the kitchen with game. In the Roman period abun- 
dance of game was not to be thought of in Italy ; distance and 
the warm climate forbade the importation of the large game that 
kept the German forests lively, or of the feathered game that 
covered the northern moors. So the Romans were driven to the 
artificial breeding of savoury wild fowl, and this they did often in 
colossal establishments, which practice led to a more or less com- 
plete domestication. These attempts, as we said before, have not 
been repeated in modern times, and though in Europe the wilder- 



BIRD-BREEDING. 281 



ness has receded farther and farther, railways now carry the game 
there killed with lightning speed from the most distant deserts to 
the centres of consumption. The Paris market fetches its par- 
tridges from Algiers and the north of Russia. On the other hand, 
varieties of the existing poultry, especially of hens and pigeons, 
are infinitely multiplied in consequence of the ever-expanding 
and ever-accelerated communication between countries, and those 
breeds that are most profitable or most beautiful gradually super- 
sede the races handed down to us from antiquity. 



HA WKING. 

One class of tamed birds, which early antiquity had only heard 
of as a distant wonder, was introduced all over Europe with the 
dominion of the Barbarians, and slowly vanished again after the 
dawn of modern civilization. We mean the birds of prey which 
were trained to chase other birds : the Kite, the Hawk, and the 
Falcon, those favourites of the knight, that perched so proudly on 
their master's wrist, and for which he often entertained a pas- 
sionate affection. Jacob Grimm has devoted a whole chapter of 
his '* History of the German Language " to hawking, setting forth 
the ruling passion for this kind of chase in passages from the poets 
and other authors of the Middle Ages, and placing the origin of 
the custom in the earliest pre-historic times of the German race. 
But here, as in some other cases, he has taken what was borrowed 
late as belonging to the earliest period : hawking is no Teutonic 
invention, but was learnt by the Germans from the Celts, and 
at no very distant period either. 

Hunting as an art is a national feature of the Celts, explained 
by the existence of a rich and powerful aristocracy in Gaul, which 
country was already highly civilized in the time of Caesar, and had 
cities, roads, bridges, tolls, etc. The Romans learnt from the 
Celts the practice of coursing in the open, the chasse au courre, 
as distinguished from shooting (with dog, crossbow and bolt, in 
the woods ; the German birsch, birschen, is from the old French 
berser) ; from them they derived the cam's Gallicus (mentioned 
already by Ovid and Martial, and preserved in the modern 
Spanish ga/go), the cam's vertragus (popularized by German lips 
into wind-hund., greyhound), and the segusius, a peculiar sort of 
hound named after a Gallic tribe on the Loire. The last two ex- 



HA WKING, 283 



pressions are found in old German codes of laws, and though the 
falcon is there mentioned as a tame hunting-bird, that does not 
prove its Old German origin. The name of the true German 
hunting-bird habicht (havoc, hawk), proves on the contrary that it 
came from Gaul; in Old Irish it is sebocc, and must have had 
that or a similar sound in the oldest Celtic. In one of the two 
branches of Celtic, namely, the British, the s of many words was 
transformed into h ; in the Cambro-Cornish dialect sebocc became 
hebanc, and the word passed to the Germans in this secondary 
form, Old High German hafiuh, Old Norse haukr, etc. The 
Germans of the very earliest times fought the bear and wolf, 
and hunted the auer-ox and bison, the elk, the schelch, and 
the wild -boar \ but they became acquainted with the art of hawk- 
ing much later from over the Rhine and the Danube. It cannot 
be affirmed that this kind of hunting ever became national in 
Germany : it was practised by noble knights and ladies on horse- 
back, followed by a troop of servitors ; the peasant never went 
hawking; he stared at the outlandish pastime of the gentles, as he 
marvelled at the knight's weapons and manner of fighting, and 
gradually learnt to pronounce the Romance names of these things. 
It is another question whether the Celtic nations that surrounded 
the Germanic world to the south and west, invented hawking or 
only developed the art, and, in the last case, whence they originally 
derived it. The most ancient mention of hawking or hunting 
with trained birds is found in Aristotle : " In the district once 
called Kedreipolis in Thrace, the small birds in the marshes are 
hunted by men in company with hawks ; the men beat the reeds 
and bushes to drive out the birds, which fly up, but are pursued 
by the hawks, and fly down again in alarm, whereupon they are 
beaten with sticks and picked up by the men, who give the hawks 
a share of the booty." Certain Thracians, therefore, used a tame 
bird of prey to frighten the game down in marshy districts ; these 
birds of prey did not catch the game themselves, but received 
their portion of the booty, just as in the later European falconry. 
Philo the Jew repeats the above account in a dialogue preserved 
in an Armenian translation, but adds: "The history of the 
Thracian hawk seemed doubtful to me till I questioned several 



284 HA WRING. 



natives, honest men, who confirmed the report." Was hawking, 
then, a Thracian invention ? We cannot tell; for though some- 
thing similar is related of India, and the Egyptians trained a par- 
ticular bird of prey to obey the human voice, those two countries 
are separated from Thrace by the whole of Western Asia, and if 
such a striking mode of hunting had existed in the latter region, 
we should have heard of it from the Greeks. Ktesias speaks 
of hawking as a curiosity of India, so that it must have been 
unknown at the Persian Court where he lived. Neither can the 
practice have existed among the nations of Asia Minor that were 
nearest the Thracians, for the Greeks never allude to it. There 
may have been some connexion which we can no longer trace 
between some race that practised this kind of chase on the 
borderland of India, and the Thracians ; the intermediate links 
being possibly Khorasmians, Massagetians, Sarmatians, and Scy- 
thians. In Layard's " Nineveh " we read that on abas-relief which 
he saw at Khorsabad there seemed to be a figure of a falconer with 
a hawk on his wrist. Unfortunately the word "seemed" renders 
the matter doubtful ; but if the rule of the great Euphrates and 
Tigris Empire extended at times to the borders of India, might 
not a mode of hunting that was common in the latter country be 
pictured for once on a wall of the royal palace in the capital ? 
The Celts, whose war-like marches and migrations often took 
them to the Balkan peninsula, may have brought thence the not 
easy art of training birds of prey for the hunt. At a certain stage 
of civilization there is nothing that nations more willingly adopt 
from their neighbours than a new and easy method of getting at 
the game which is the object of their desires. Those Celts, at 
least, who invaded Italy and burned Rome, cannot yet have been 
acquainted with hawking, for there is not a trace of such a thing to 
be found among the old Romans. Hints of it first appear now and 
then during the Imperial period, but in a very uncertain way, until 
suddenly, during the final migrations of the nations, we find it 
mentioned by all authors and assumed to be generally practised. 
One of Martial's epigrams, which speaks of the hawk "being a 
servant of the fowler, and catching birds not for himself," seems a 
clear proof of the use of hawks for the chase ; but, at the same 



HA WKWG. 285 



time, Pliny tells of the newly published and highly remarkable 
report, that in the neighbourhood of Eriza in Asia (which was a 
town in Caria on the borders of Lycia and Phrygia), one Craterus 
Monoceros hunted with the help of ravens, which found and drove 
out the game for him, and that when he rode out with them, 
even wild ravens joined him. A passage in Apuleius, in the 
latter half of the succeeding century, seems to point to hawking ; 
but in the following description of a kind of hawking we have 
perhaps an explanation both of Martial's epigram and of Apuleius's 
words. This description, from the paraphrase of Oppian, runs 
thus: "An agreeable way of hunting is to take a falcon and 
place it under a bush ; the little birds are afraid, and try to hide 
among the branches, but still they gaze at the falcon as if fascinated, 
like a traveller who suddenly sees a robber ; and so the bird- 
catcher can take the birds from the trees at his leisure." Here we 
have the beginning of a still very imperfect mode of hunting with 
birds of prey. But in the fourth and fifth centuries hawking is 
mentioned by various authors as a completely developed, favourite, 
and wide-spread sport, which without doubt was derived from the 
barbarians. In the half-fabulous " History of the Saxons " by Widu- 
kind, we find a hunter with a hawk : A Thuringian went with his 
hawk out of the besieged town of Scheidungen on the Unstrut, 
which, trusting in the promise of peace, believed itself safe. He 
went to the river's bank in search of food ; but having let his bird 
fly, one of the Saxons on the opposite bank presently caught it and 
refused to return it. The Thuringian said, * Give ine the bird, and 
I will tell you an important secret ; ' and the telling of this secret 
leads to the fall of the town — a kind of incident not uncommon 
in fairy tales. 

During the Middle Ages hawking flourished all over feudal 
Europe ; it spread from Germany and Byzantium to the East and 
to the nations of Asia, and was practised by Electors and Emperors, 
Emirs, Sheiks, and Shahs, down to the Nomads of the Steppe 
and the Bedouins of the Desert. Marco Polo found hawking the 
fashion in the capitals of Mongolian princes as far as China, as 
later travellers did in Mohammedan countries in the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries. In Europe it began to fall into disuse 



286 HA WK1NG. 



as the gun became common, and it was at last forgotten ; but it is 
characteristic that the names of the newly invented weapons were 
so often copied from those of the birds of prey which they had 
superseded ; for example, the falconetto, the moschetto, musket 
(properly sparrow-hawk), the terzeruolo (properly male-hawk), the 
sagro (properly saker-falcon). In France, down to the Revolution, 
the king's falconers headed all ceremonial court processions, or 
rather persons bearing their insignia, for in reality there was no 
longer any fauconnerie dn Roi. In England some few squires still 
go hawking in honour of venerable traditions, and procure the 
necessary trained birds from Belgium ; while in Asia hawking is 
still a favourite sport in many districts (note 72). 



THE PLUM-TREE. 

(PRUNUS DOMESTICA, PRUNUS INSITITIA.) 

The plum-tree, primus, is only once mentioned by Cato. At that 
time, therefore, there could be no common cultivation of the tree 
in orchards, or any consequent variety of kinds. On the other 
hand, the fruit is quite familiar to the poets of the golden age. 
Virgil speaks of Cerea pruna, waxen plums, and Ovid explains 
what they were : " Not only the black, but the nobler kind that 
borrow the hue of fresh wax." Virgil alludes to grafting the 
cultivated plum on the sloe-tree. At Horace's villa plums were 
to be seen on thorn-trees. Columella is acquainted with three 
kinds, while Pliny mentions a bewildering multitude of varieties. 
He speaks of Damascene plums as the finest, and this plum pro- 
vided the Byzantines and modern Greeks with a general name for 
cultivated plum-trees. The name prunus accompanied the tree 
and the fruit from Italy to all the countries of West and Central 
Europe. The Romans, on their side, had borrowed the name 
from the Greeks, though Galen says the Greek proumnon meant 
by rights the wild plum ; yet, as often happens in similar cases, it 
was also applied to the Primus domestica. The usual name in 
Greek is kokkymelon (the first half of which is an Oriental word), 
while the sloe on its native thorn was brabylon. The oldest 
authorities for the former are, first, a quotation by Pollux from 
Archilochus (700 B.C.) ; next, a fragment of Hipponax (middle of 
sixth century). In a treatise on plums, Athenseus informs us that 
the Rhodians and Sikeliotes called plums also brabyla. Theocritus 
does not confirm this. In one of the two passages of that poet 
in which the word occurs, the arrival of the beloved one is said to 



288 THE PLUM-TREE, 



be sweet as spring compared with winter, or the melon with the 
brabylon; the last word can scarcely mean the delicious plum; 
more likely melon is an abbreviation for kokkymelon. In the other 
passage apples, pears, and brabyla are mentioned together, and 
nothing hinders us from supposing that the native sloes were 
meant. For the sloe the modern Romance languages use the 
diminutive of plum, prugnola, prunelle ; the Engl, bullace is said 
to be derived from Celtic ; sloe, Germ, schlehe, Old Germ. sleM, 
Mid. Germ. sUhe, agree letter for letter with the Slavic sliva, a 
plum ; the French creque, or perhaps the Latin gracu?n itself, is 
the original of the German krieche, and Old Pruss. krichaytos ; the 
German zwetsche, which has a Slavic sound, but is not found in 
those languages, is perhaps a corruption of damaskenon, as the 
English, too, have made their damson out of the same Greek 
word. The Italian susina, Spanish endrina, perhaps named after 
places or persons, agree in their endings with Pliny's onychina, 
malina, etc. The name mirabelle, Ital. mirabella, is said to be 
derived from myro-balanos, originally an Indian name of a fruit 
that was used for making an ointment, and then applied in Greece 
to a native kind of small yellowish plum. The Tyrolian zeiber is 
the cibara of the neighbouring Slovens. 

The Prunus insititia, with round fruit, and inured to the 
northern winter, may have been indigenous in Europe, but in its 
present improved form it comes, like the true plum, from Asia. 
Among the ancients the two plum-trees were the less accurately 
distinguished, as even the first bore, and still bears under cultiva- 
tion, the finest of fruit ; for example, the green-gage. Our French 
name for this plum, Reine- Claude, shows that in this branch also of 
orchard-culture France is the real classic land, either by reason of 
its climate, or the industrial labours of its inhabitants. If we go 
farther south, to the Mediterranean coasts, we find that the plum 
loses much of its delicious aroma. But the European region 
where the cultivation of plum-trees is carried on on a large scale, 
and is an integral factor in production, is the borderland of 
Austria and Turkey (see ThoemmeFs " Bosnia," and Kanitz's 
" Servia "). There one meets with whole forests of plum-trees, the 
fruit of which, newly plucked, forms for four or six weeks the 



THE PLUM-TREE. 289 



principal food of the population, and, when dried, is sent in great 
quantities to Germany and even America. Pigs and plums are 
almost the only equivalents with which these countries pay for 
their foreign necessaries. But the chief use to which the abundant 
produce is put is the making of plum-brandy, the favourite slivovica. 
Though immense quantities of this article are consumed on the 
spot — for to what are those races more predestined than to the 
consumption of raki? — the exportation is also considerable. We 
do not know how old the culture of the plum-tree is in those 
countries, nor whether it goes back beyond the time of the Slav 
immigrations. But to make a drink from berries, in which the 
north-east of Europe is rich, is an Old Slavonian or East European 
national trait, that was already hinted at by Herodotus in his 
description of the countries beyond Scythia. 



J 9 



THE MULBERRY-TREE. 
(morus nigra.) 

This Medo- Persian tree was rather early transplanted to the West 
on account of its pleasantly sourish-sweet and purple fruit. It 
attains a considerable height, and its dark green foliage comes out 
late in spring, on which account, Pliny tells us, it was surnamed 
Sapientissima arboru?n, the prudent tree, that ventures out only 
when frost is no longer to be feared. The berries, which resemble 
raspberries, and in their native country are often an inch long, 
are wholesome and pleasant only when they are fully ripe ; and 
then they must be eaten without delay, for the juice easily 
ferments and turns to vinegar. They are therefore plucked early 
in the morning, as they were in the time of Horace, and are 
bought and consumed before the heat of the day has spoiled 
them. The ancients were struck most with their dark purple 
colour ; Horace and Martial call them black, Virgil and Columella 
blood-red ; the Dictator Sulla had a very red face spotted with 
white, which a satirical Athenian poet compared to a mulberry 
sprinkled with meal. It was said that elephants whose trunks 
were smeared with mulberries before a battle became very eager 
for the fight, evidently because of the resemblance of the juice to 
blood, (i Maccab. vi. 34: "And to provoke the elephants to 
fight, they showed them the blood of grapes and mulberries.") 
Luxurious ladies, and gay people who went masquerading, painted 
their temples and cheeks with the juice of mulberries; and the 
wine they drank, when too pale, was very likely also darkened 
with the red juice, as is even now the custom in the South. 

If we inquire when the mulberry-tree was first introduced into 



MULBERRY. 



291 



Europe from its Asiatic home, some accidently preserved poetical 
passages refer us to the time of the Attic Tragedy; others, a 
century later, to that of the Middle and New Comedy. But the 
confounding of the true mulberry with the sycamore, the Egyptian 
mulberry-fig, and, on the other hand, with the blackberry and 
raspberry, throws some doubt on the meaning of this testimony. 
The sycamore, a wide-spreading, shady tree with fig-like fruit, 
indigenous to Egypt, but also, where the soil allowed it, frequently 
planted in Semitic countries, such as Palestine and Cyprus, had 
not remained unknown to the Greeks in their intercourse with 
those regions. The tree was valued not only for its cooling shade, 
but for its fruit, which was an article of food among the lower 
classes, and also for its excellent timber, which was said to be 
both strong and light. In the Hebrew Scriptures the sycamore 
appears only in the two plural forms shikmim and shikmot ; and 
if we compare with these the two Greek names, the earlier syka- 
initios, and the later sykomoros, it is at once apparent that these 
last were formed from the above Hebrew words, or rather from 
the corresponding ones in Syria or Lower Egypt. 

Rightly or wrongly, the true mulberry-tree was thought very 
like this sykomore, and also borrowed its name. Theophrastus, 
and after him Pliny and Dioscorides, said, " The mulberry-tree 
is very like the sycamore, for it has a similar leaf, and resembles 
it in size and form." And Diodorus says distinctly, " There are 
two sorts of sycamines, one of which bears mulberries, and the 
other a fruit like figs." But the fruit of the mulberry also 
resembled that of the bramble-bush, batos, and the primitive 
name of this latter (Gr. mora, Lat. mora), could easily be extended 
to the former. Phanias the Eresian, a pupil of Aristotle, wished 
to limit the name moron to the fruit of the wild sycamine, that is, 
to the blackberry, which was also very sweet ; but the extension 
of name was too firmly rooted. Nay, the Alexandrians, as 
Athenseus reports, used mora exclusively for mulberries, probably 
because sycamina was already the fixed name for the fruit of the 
Egyptian sycamore, which was common among them. Even the 
word batia, which is quite literally the berries of the bramble, 
was now and then applied to mulberries. So that when ^Eschylus 



292 THE MULB E RR Y- TREE. 

in his tragedy " The Phrygians," says Hector was riper than the 
mora, we cannot be sure whether the poet was thinking of 
mulberries, and must therefore have known that fruit, or whether 
he did not more likely mean the native blackberry. When we 
remember that the mulberry is uneatable before it is fully ripe, 
and must then be rapidly plucked and devoured, an allusion to 
that fruit might perhaps be more suitable to Hector's fate. But 
another fragment of ^Eschylus, describing both white, red, and 
black mora all growing at once on the same bush (where Athe- 
naeus, who knew the context, tells us he was speaking of the batos, 
bramble), shows unmistakably that he meant blackberries. There 
are similar doubts about a fragment from a lost tragedy of 
Sophocles, and in a quotation from Epicharmus ; but in 
poets of the New Comedy (from 350 b.c.) we at last find the 
mulberry clearly and unmistakably referred to : " You dye your 
cheeks with sycamines instead of paint," etc. Theophrastus, 
with more exactitude, distinguishes the sykaminos (mulberry-tree) 
from the sykaminos ^Egyptia (sycamore) ; and the first, under 
the name of morea, is clearly to be recognised in a couplet of 
Nicander preserved in Athenaeus, which calls it " the delight of 
the young, and the first herald of the happy fruit-time." And, in 
fact, the Morus nigra, while the last to bud in spring, is the first 
to bear fruit in summer. At the time of Galen moron was already 
the name in general use, and sykaminon nothing but a classical 
archaism: "I would rather say moron" he remarks, "which is 
familiar to all, than sykaminon, like the Attic writers of six 
hundred years ago; he is a fool who thinks more of so-called 
correct language, than of a healthy life." The more singular is 
the fact that the modern Greeks say sykamenea as well as morea. 

When the tree was introduced into Italy, the name sykaminos 
was already obsolete ; thenceforward it was called mora, like the 
raspberry and blackberry bush. If moron was a Doric word, 
and used by Epicharmus in Sicily, both tree and name must 
have reached the Latins through Magna Graecia; the name in 
this sense, that the example of the Greeks led the Latin-speaking 
nations to extend their own undoubtedly ancient word morum to 
the new fruit. Where any mistake was possible, they would very 



MULBERRY. SILK. 293 



likely say morum celsce arboris (the m. of the tall tree), and call 
the tree itself morusceha, whence probably its Italian name of gelso. 
The ancient poets often mention the fruit ; Ovid, in the fourth 
book of his " Metamorphoses," tells us how the red colour of the 
mulberry originated, namely, in the blood of Pyramus, when he 
killed himself under a mulberry-tree for the love of Thisbe, quite 
an Asiatic legend, which we find repeated about other plants, 
and the scene of which, this time, is laid in Babylon, thus pre- 
serving a recollection of the tree having come from the far East. 
The mulberry-tree was never very delicate ; for since that time 
it has crossed the Alps, and thrives not only in France but in 
England, Germany, and even Scandinavia, though sometimes in 
a hard winter it dies of frost. A thousand years later, it became 
more important for its foliage than on account of its fruit ; for 
it made the immigration of the Indian- Chinese silkworm possible. 
Its first planters, who thought of nothing but the dark berries, 
little dreamt that one day the rough leaves would, by a manifold 
metamorphosis through a small caterpillar, be changed into a 
soft, glistening, costly tissue. It is true that the Romans had 
gradually become acquainted with silken robes worth their weight 
in gold, but they had not the least idea that the wonderful threads 
were nothing but spun mulberry-leaves. In course of time the 
Morns nigra transferred its office of feeding silkworms to a still 
later arrival from Central and Eastern Asia, the Morus alba, a 
sister-tree of smaller size, with smoother and tenderer leaves and 
white, honey-sweet fruit, which appeared in Europe towards the 
end of the Middle Ages. The Persian provinces on the Caspian 
Sea, and Italy and France in Europe, those silk-countries of the 
West, are now, in the districts where the industry flourishes, 
covered all over with cut and despoiled white mulberry-trees; 
it is only here and there in remote, lag-behind districts that the 
mulberry-tree of the ancients is still found nourishing a spinning- 
worm that produces a coarser kind of silk. A still more service- 
able kind of morus than the usual white mulberry-tree, the Morus 
alba multicaulis, has been brought into Europe from Manilla, where 
it had been introduced from China, and is said to thrive well 
when properly treated (note 73). 



ALMONDS. WALNUTS. CHESTNUTS. 

In the Imperial age of Rome the three above-named fruits were 
clearly distinguished as juglandes, walnuts ; amygdalae, almonds ; 
and nuces casianece, chestnuts ; but the farther back we go, the 
more these names become confused. So long as the trees them- 
selves, which are so different in nature and appearance that it 
is impossible to confound them, were not generally known, their 
fruits being only brought by sea, in sacks or earthen vessels, to 
the market, say, of Athens, native words like nut or acorn were 
applied to the foreign fruits, with the addition of some epithet to 
signify the nature of the shell, or the country where the fruit was 
said to grow, or, lastly, the seaport that supplied them. But the 
application of these names was so variable, that the popular 
name of Jupiter's acorn, Dios dalanos, which in Greece generally 
meant the chestnut, has in the corresponding Latin form juglans 
(Jovi-glans) the meaning of walnut. We find the almond men- 
tioned earliest ; under the name of amygdale, it is already common 
in the Comic poets ; but the names of the walnut, chestnut, and 
some better kinds of hazelnut, are jumbled together for a long 
time after. 

If we compare the chief passages, we recognise at least one 
indubitable geographical fact, namely, that all these fruits came from 
the middle parts of Asia Minor, particularly from the regions of the 
Pontus, and at a comparatively late period. All the names used 
by the ancient authors point to that part of the world, and signify 
nuts or acorns named after Sardes in Lydia, or a district on 
Mount Ida, or Sinope and Heraklea, the two ports on the Black 
Sea ; and brought from Paphlagonia, lying on the same sea. The 
district name of Pontic nuts is quite common, and is chiefly, but 



CHESTNUT. 295 



not exclusively, used for a large kind of hazel-nut, as is also the 
name of Persian or royal nuts, because they came from a district 
subject to the Persian kings. 

But whence came the word castanea (chest-nut), and when does 
it first occur? Xenophon with the Ten Thousand came to the 
Mosynoikoi, a Pontic nation, and there found a quantity of broad 
nuts stored up in lofts — intended therefore for the people's food — 
which later writers took to be chestnuts. More likely they were a 
large kind of corylus (hazel) which does grow in that region ; at 
any rate, he does not use the word chestnut. In Theophrastus the 
words " similar to the Kastanaic nut " look very like a later gloss, 
as that is not his usual name for the chestnut. The poet Nicander, 
in the second century B.C., is the first who speaks plainly of the 
nut produced by the land of Kastanis. But where was that coun- 
try ? The Scholiast says : " Kastanis, a town of Thessaly." Now 
on the coast of Thessaly, at the foot of Pelion, in Magnesia, there 
really was a small harbour, or village as Strabo calls it, named 
Kasthanaia, Kastanaia, mentioned first by Herodotus. Theophras- 
tus also says that in Magnesia and on the opposite island of 
Eubcea there grew many Eubcean nuts, that is, chestnuts. Must 
we suppose that the fruit took its name from thai little-known spot, 
or rather did not people catch at any geographical name to ex- 
plain it by ? But our Scholiast adds a second explanation : " Or 
Kastanis, a city of Pontus, where chestnuts abound " — which is a 
great deal more likely in itself, if only we could find any trace of 
such a city in Pontus. Or have we here a hint of that mysterious 
Kastamon, south-west of Sinope, which was known as an impor- 
tant place at the Byzantine period, though the ancients did not 
mention it ? That inscription in Boeckh, which he says contains 
no Roman traces, can at all events not be so very far off the 
Roman times, as it contains the word Kastanaia. The fact that 
the names glans regia, Dios balanos, and juglans for the chestnut 
are found in different Oriental languages would be significant, if 
such names as bendak, pandek for nux Pontica, the Arabic mitkon 
for malum Medicum, and the like, did not prove that Western 
names of fruits often found their way back to the East. Though not 
in the Semitic, yet in Iranic dialects, especially Old Armenian, 



296 ALMONDS. WALNUTS. CHESTNUTS. 

students of those languages would, we believe, discover the origin 
and an explanation of the word "chestnut." — In Italy towards the 
middle of the second century b.c. Cato never mentions either 
Juglandes, or castanece, or amygdala ; but he urges the planting of 
the following nuts : the calva, Avellana, Prcenestina, and Grceca. 
The "nuts of Avella" are the finer hazel-nuts transplanted from 
the Grecian coast towns to Campania, which we call filberts, and 
which the Greeks had derived from the Pontus ; but how are we to 
explain the nux Grceca ? Ernst Meyer, in his " History of Botany," 
guessed that it might be the chestnut ; but the later Roman writers 
invariably mean by it the almond. Columella calls the tree 
a?nygdala, the fruit nux Grceca. Pliny " doubts if the almond 
could have existed in Italy in Cato's time, because he called it 
Greek nut" If then, as we cannot doubt, Cato's nux Grceca was 
the almond, we have to choose between the walnut and the 
chestnut for the nux calva. Now the Scholiast on Nicander Alex. 
271, divides chestnuts into four kinds, one of them the gymno-lopos 
or naked-shelled ; calvus (bald, bare) might well mean the same 
thing ; and nux calva may therefore be the chestnut. Again, in 
Plautus's " Calceolus " some one speaks of a nux mollusca hang- 
ing over his roof. Comparing this with the same Scholiast's 
" soft " chestnut, and Virgil's castanece ??iolles (soft shelled), we may 
fairly suppose it was a chestnut-tree that shaded the house. In 
any case, the want of settled names proves that there was no 
general cultivation of these trees in Italy at the time of Cato and 
Plautus. — Walnuts under the name of juglandes are often men- 
tioned by Varro, and once by Cicero, who relates that the elder 
Dionysius's daughters singed that tyrant's beard off with red-hot 
nut-shells; Virgil is the first to speak of chestnuts as castanece 
nuces ; and a medical book of the beginning of the first century 
a.d. mentions sweet and bitter almonds for the first time. From 
that period the trees, as well as the names, were as common in 
Italy as the nod t mandorle, and castagne (walnuts, almonds, and 
chestnuts) are to-day. Early in January, if the weather be mild, 
otherwise in February or March, the almond- trees in every gar- 
den are white with blossom before the leaves appear ; walnut-trees 
with their thick aromatic foliage shade the roads even in the 



CHESTNUT. 297 



north ; and in Italy, Spain, and part of France, chestnuts have so 
multiplied as to become real woods, which according to the lati- 
tude, belt the mountains at a higher or lower elevation ; for exam- 
ple, the splendid chestnuts round the volcanic cone of Etna. The 
fruit of this latter tree has become such a popular food, that in 
France the idleness of the Corsicans is attributed to their chest- 
nuts, and the destruction of those trees has been thought desir- 
able — a similar thing to the idleness caused by the tropical banana. 
In fact, if a Corsican family possesses but two dozen chestnut- 
trees, and a flock of goats, which find their own pasture all the year 
round, their wants are fully provided for, and the father and each 
of the sons only desire to save up a small sum to purchase a — rifle. 
In the wild Italian Apennines the inhabitants also live for a great 
part of the year on chestnuts and chestnut-meal, and suffer greatly 
if a bad season brings a scanty crop. The shade of the chestnut- 
tree is welcome in the heats of summer, and, besides its fruit, it is 
valuable on account of its timber, which is used not only for fuel, 
but for tools and utensils of every kind. Therefore the tree is one 
of the most important acquisitions of culture that we have inherited 
from antiquity. It is true that the chestnuts of South Italy give 
the botanist an impression of their having been indigenous there 
from the very first ; and Link, who is said to have thoroughly 
studied the south of Europe, informs us in his " Urwelt und 
Alterthum," that the primitive races in Europe, even before the 
pastoral period, fed chiefly on chestnuts. But this assertion is 
contradicted by the fact that neither Greeks nor Romans had an 
individual name for the chestnut-tree and its fruit. The truth is, 
that the climate and soil of the mountains of Southern and part 
of Central Europe were so favourable to the tree that it spread 
rapidly, escaped the tutelage of man, and has in whole districts 
become a real forest-tree. 

It is not the only case of the kind. After the conquest of 
Teneriffe by the Spaniards at the end of the fifteenth century, 
chestnuts were planted in that island, "and now form a forest, 
the European origin of which is only betrayed by the European 
flowers that it shelters," as L. von Buch tells us in his treatise on 
the flora of the Canary Isles. We must not forget that two 



298 ALMONDS. WALNUTS. CHESTNUTS. 

thousand years and more have elapsed since the presumed intro- 
duction of this tree. Wait as long, and America will offer similar 
phenomena on a much larger scale. If the Greeks had found the 
chestnut-tree existing in their future country when they first arrived, 
they would certainly have mentioned its fruit in their legends. 
But we only hear of the acorns of the drus, the esculent oak ; and 
the aborigines, such as the wild Arcadians in their mountains and 
woods, are always called acorn-eaters (batanephagoi), even by the 
oracles. When Hesiod describes the blessings of peace and justice, 
the earth bringing forth fruits, the oak bearing acorns, the bees 
furnishing honey, and the sheep yielding its fleece — would he 
have forgotten to mention the chestnut, if it had then grown on 
the mountains, bestowing sweet fruit on mankind? And would 
the Latin poets, when describing the Golden Age, have limited 
themselves to mentioning arbutus-fruit, strawberries, cornel-cherries, 
blackberries, and acorns? That the regions south of the Cau- 
casus, and the northern seaboard of Asia Minor, bring forth all 
kinds of nuts and chestnuts in great abundance and perfection, is 
proved by the unanimous testimony of travellers ancient and 
modern. Kolenati saw hazels in Armenia, whose trunks measured 
from two to three feet in diameter ; Wutzer, during his travels in 
the East, found chestnut and plane-trees on his way from Nicaea 
to Brussa, the size of which amazed him : "These two are the giants 
of Western Asiatic vegetation, the plane-tree taking the first place, 
the chestnut the second. ... It was chestnut-gathering time, and 
numbers of asses laden with sacks stood ready to carry the fruit, 
which was knocked down by men and boys, while women 
picked it up and packed it. The glowing sunbeams tried in vain 
to penetrate the thick foliage." From these regions chestnuts 
came overland through Thrace, Macedonia, and Thessaly to 
Eubcea, after which island they were called " Eubcean nuts " at 
Athens. In the present day the Greek chestnuts are small and the 
bitter shell is generally intergrown with the kernel ; they are 
therefore not pleasant to eat. Of European lands, the best chest- 
nuts, improved by culture, are furnished by the South of France 
(note 74). 

The wild or so-called Horse-chestnut {ALsciilus hippocastaniim) 



HORSE-CHESTNUT. 299 



is one of those trees that Europe owes to the Turks. This beauti- 
ful, shady, early-budding tree came from Constantinople by way of 
Vienna towards the end of the sixteenth century, and very soon 
became a favourite ornament of gardens and public promenades 
— witness the chestnuts of the Tuileries Garden, and among them 
the celebrated Napoleon tree. The showy, upright blossom suited 
the Turkish taste, like the tulip ; the prosaic name of Horse-chest- 
nut is said to be derived from the Turkish custom of curing the 
cough in horses by means of its fruit 



THE CHERRY-TREE, 

(PRUNUS CERASUS.) 

That the cherry was brought to Europe by rich Lucullus, the 
conqueror of Mithridates, is known to every boy who has learnt 
anything of Roman history ; though with a basketful of the sweet 
ripe berries before him the fact may be as indifferent to him as 
to the pilfering sparrow on the tree. Many ancient writers, from 
Pliny downwards, relate that after destroying the city of Cerasus, 
which stood on the Pontic coast between Sinope and Trapezunt, 
the Roman general, L. Lucullus, transplanted cherry-trees from that 
neighbourhood to Italy — at any rate, a more valuable and lasting 
spoil-of-war than the colossal gold statue of Mithridates, the 
jewelled shield, or the many gold and silver vessels paraded at 
Lucullus's triumphal entry into Rome. We do not know whence 
Pliny got his account ; Plutarch, who in his " Life of Lucullus " has 
collected a great number of details, is silent about the intro- 
duction of a new kind of fruit-tree by his hero. However, Pliny's 
story is supported by the fact that Cato never mentions cherries, 
Varro only once, but later authors frequently. The fruit, however, 
was not entirely unknown in the time of Lucullus; for, 
firstly, Athenseus quotes a passage from Diphilus of Siphnus, a 
contemporary of Lysimachus, whose kingdom extended to 
Western Asia, in which the dietetic qualities of cherries (kerasid) 
are explained, the preference being given to red and Milesian 
cherries ; secondly, there was an indigenous Italian species (Prunus 
avium) not distinguished by the ancients from the Cornelian 
cherry-tree {Cornus mascula), the fruit of which had never been 
improved, and perhaps could not be. This sweet wild cherry, 



CHERRY. 301 



together with the cornel-cherry and privet, are described by 
Theophrastus under the names of the male and female kraneia ; 
the male tree had very hard, the female a softer wood. The 
inhabitants of Mount Ida said the female-tree bore fruit that was 
sweety fragrant, and fit to eat ; the Macedonians, on the contrary, 
said that both trees were fruitful, but the fruit of the female was 
uneatable. These sweet cherries of Mount Ida and Miletus were 
already improved at the time of Lysimachus, and may have been 
the kerasia meant by Diphilus ; but those that Lucullus first saw 
in the Pontic kingdom, and bestowed upon Italy, must have been 
a more cultivated, larger, juicier kind of sour cherry. So soon as 
the fruit was known and appreciated, both kinds of tree were 
widely propagated, largely imported from Asia (which was fully 
opened soon after), and being grafted on the wild Italian species, 
produced a vast number of varieties, including the finest and 
most delicious. It was a special advantage in the cherry that it 
ripened so early in summer, affording the refreshment of its rich 
juice when other fruits were still backward. Coming from the 
Pontus, a region with hard winters, and being already in its 
commoner kinds indigenous to Southern Europe, the cherry-tree 
could go on advancing all through the middle and even some 
way into the north of the continent. In fact, at the time of 
Pliny, a hundred and twenty years after it first appeared in Italy, 
the cherry-tree had already crossed the sea into Britain ; it grew on 
the banks of the Rhine; in Belgium people prized the "Lusi- 
tanian " cherries, so that the tree must have reached Portugal too, 
and formed a new variety there. Nay, in the Alps, and in the 
once barbarous countries beyond the Alps, the cherry-tree bears 
more aromatic fruit than near the Mediterranean, where the 
neighbourhood of the sea makes the climate too uniformly mild. 
At the present day, Tyrol, Switzerland, and the Upper Rhine are 
a fine cherry country, where the plant thrives particularly well. 
As the well-known kirschwasser (Swiss cherry-brandy) is made 
from the surplus of the cherry-harvest in Switzerland, so in 
Dalmatia, Trieste, and Venetia, the maraschino rosolio is made 
of the marasca (sour cherry), and in delicacy of flavour excels 
its Hungarian and Servian neighbour, the plum-slivovica. 



302 THE CHERRY-TREE. 

Corresponding to the two principal European species of cherry, 
the sweet and the sour, we find two principal names running 
through the European languages. The Latin cerasus, Greek 
kerasos, cannot be derived from the Sinopean colony Kerasous ; 
the town, on the contrary, took its name from the tree growing 
there. Kerasos seems to be only the Asia Minor form of the 
really Greek word kraneia, found even in Homer, Latin cornus 
(cornel-tree), the two words being closely related to keras, Latin 
cornu (horn), and descriptive of the horny hardness of the wood, 
which made it particularly suitable for javelins. Mark Theo- 
phrastus's description : "The wood of the kraneia is without pith, 
quite solid, resembling horn in closeness of grain and in strength ; 
but that of the female kraneia has an internal pith, is softer and 
hollow, and is therefore unsuitable for spears." In the Homeric 
Hymn to Hermes, a spear has the adjective epithet kraneion ; and 
later, even kraneia by itself meant a lance. It is remarkable that 
in Lithuanian ragotine (spear) is, in like manner, derived from 
rdgas (horn), so that the spear of hornbeam or privet must be a 
very old European weapon. Again, the German Homung and Lith. 
Raguttis (February) are named after the hard-frozen earth during 
that month. Theophrastus mentions the word kerasos too, but it 
is clear from his description that he meant a forest tree, of which 
the bast was used for making ropes, and the red fruit, the size of 
a bean, with a soft kernel, was uneatable. It is the improved 
cherry, which was likewise a tree with red fruit, that the Greeks 
on the Pontus called kerasos, a name that passed into Italy with 
the tree, and from Italy to all Transalpine Europe. The Romance 
languages, as usual, formed their word from the adjective ceraseus; 
the German kirsche was taken not from them, but directly from 
the Latin, therefore at the time of the Teutonic Migration, or 
shortly after. The Slavic criesnia was borrowed from the German 
after the migration of the Slavs into the Danubian lands; the 
Magyar tseresznye was derived from the Slavic; and the By- 
zantian kerasos has passed into the Turkish, Persic, and Kurd 
languages, etc. — The origin of the other name, which is spread 
throughout Europe, and generally signifies the sour cherry, is 
more obscure ; Ital. visciola, Old French guisne, now guigne, Span. 



CHERRY. 303 



guinda, Germ, weichsel, Old Germ, wihsela, Slav, vishnia, vishm, 
Lith. vyszna, Mod. Greek bisenon, bisinon (also in Wallachian, 
Albanian, and Turkish) — all different forms of the same word 
without the Consonant-change that unborrowed congeners would 
exhibit. If we could find any connexion of meaning between 
the cherry and the fruit of the mistletoe, or rather — as that would 
probably be easy — if any fact assured us of its reality, then 
the word would not only be explained by the Greek vixos, 
Latin viscus, viscum, but our natural derivation of the fruit 
from Italy would be confirmed by the name. But if we must 
suppose the German word to come first — to which we are led by 
the French and Spanish initial gu — we have first to remove our 
guttural h, ch, which has here crept in before si, as it has in the 
name of the river Wek^sel (Vistula, Slav. Visla) ; while in the 
Low German wispel tree (bird -cherry), a German sound was 
procured by the addition of a p (note 75). In a fragment of 
the Comic poet Amphis the fruit of the kraneia, the cornel-cherry, 
is called mespilon : we do not know whether this might not furnish 
r clue. 



ARgUTUS. ME DIC A. CYTISUS. 

(strawberry-tree.) (lucerne.) (laburnum.) 

To the hot and mountainous South are denied the flowery 
fields of the North, and the green meadows of the high Alps ; 
the place of the latter is supplied by the evergreen herbs and 
shrubs which, long after the woods have retired before advancing 
culture, clothe promontories, rocky coasts, and the edges of 
ravines and water-courses. Of one of the most beautiful little 
trees of those regions, the strawberry-tree (Arbutus unedo), we 
do not know whether it always existed there, or migrated from the 
south-east in company with man. This tree — with its laurel-like 
leaves; its strawberry-shaped fruit, first green, then yellow, and 
then bright red ; its branches clothed with fruit and blossom at 
the same time, like the lemon-tree ; and its ever-renewed foliage 
whose regular disappearing and appearing was correctly observed 
by Theophrastus — this tree is scarcely ever seen farther north than 
Central Italy ; but in Arabia, as Juba (quoted by Pliny) exagger- 
atingly asserts, it attains a height of nearly ioo feet. Varro 
reckons the fruit of the arbutus — like acorns, blackberries, and 
apples — among the fruits of the primitive world, those offered 
spontaneously by the virgin soil, and consequently not produced 
and propagated by culture; and Ovid says the same. In the pre- 
sent day, both in Greece and Italy, the arbutus fruit is considered 
unwholesome, having a numbing effect, and is left to the birds, with 
whom it is a favourite tit-bit. This popular prejudice already 
prevailed among the ancients of the later period, as we learn 
from Dioscorides. Theophrastus, on the contrary, says that it may 
be fearlessly eaten ; Galen tells us it was enjoyed by the country 



THE STRA WBERR Y- TREE. 



305 



people; and in modern times, northern travellers have eaten it 
with impunity. Petter, in his book on Damatia, says, " I and my 
family have often eaten the beautiful red berries of the strawberry- 
tree with wine, sugar, and cinnamon, and felt no benumbing 
effects." 

From the difference in the names used by the Greeks and the 
Romans, we may conclude that the strawberry-tree did not grow 
in the country whence the original stock of the Greeks and Italians 
set out to wander in different directions. The Latin arbutus, 
arbutum, is evidently connected with arbos, arbustum; Benfey 
explains the Greek komaros as "twisted, creeping," which does not 
agree with the nature of the tree; Fick considers' it a primitive 
Indo-European name. The Greek name for the fruit, mi??iaikylon, 
is first used by Aristophanes, and then by Theophrastus. (Benfey 
thinks it a combination of mini- with aky/os, the edible acorn ; but 
we might explain it as winter fruit, mctimasso.) The arbutus 
atidrachne, andrachle, was also known to the ancients — probably 
signifying the bush which yields good charcoal, anthrax. 

In these evergreen bushes the flocks of the peasant found suffi- 
cient nourishment for their wants; but as they were not always to 
be found near home, the ancients hit upon the plan of stripping 
the trees planted in their gardens, and using the leaves, in addition 
to the expensive corn and flour, for feeding domestic animals. 
The ass and the goat, we may say, had set the example ; the ass 
devoured anything, were it never so prickly, hard, or sticky, and 
the goat showed a strong partiality for the young leaves of bushes 
and small trees. The branches that fell during the pruning of the 
olives and vines were given to the animals, and in autumn the 
withered leaves were collected for the same purpose. This not 
proving sufficient, people began to plant the borders of the fields, 
ditches, and paths with single or double rows of trees, which 
furnished wood for firing and rural tools, and leaves for fodder 
and litter. Thus the southern modes of agriculture led to leaf- 
forage and forest-gardening. Cato already gives the following 
advice, which sounds strange to a northern farmer: "As long as 
you have it, give your oxen the foliage of elms, poplars, oaks, and 
fig-trees; and to the sheep green leaves ;" and in another place he 

20 



306 ARBUTUS. MEDIC A. CYTISUS. 

repeats : " If you have no hay, give the oxen oak and ivy leaves." 
This sort of fodder is so often mentioned by the later agricultural 
authors, that its general use cannot be doubted. 

In this feature we see clearly how much southern and antique 
husbandry differed, and still differs, from the modern husbandry 
of northern latitudes : the latter, which has larger space, receives 
its gifts more directly from the hand of nature ; the former owes 
everything to itself, and lives as if in a second, self-created world, 
from which rude nature seems to be infinitely distant. But even 
the ancients must have found that not every kind of leaf was 
calculated to render the plough-ox strong, the butcher's-ox fat, 
and the milch-cow generous in her yield ; and this gave occasion 
to introduce from the East those forage-plants which were better 
suited for the purpose. Such acquisitions were the medico, or 
lucerne and the cytisus, both of which were unknown to Cato, but 
are mentioned by Varro, and therefore must have been introduced 
into Italy in the interval between the middle of the second and 
the middle of the first centuries, b.c. The Medike poa (Median 
grass), Latin Medica, Medicago sativa, came, as the name indicates, 
from Media, from the well-watered, verdant districts south-east of 
the Caucasus, which Strabo describes as so charming, and in 
which he expressly says that the highly- valued lucerne grew. It 
was said to be especially beneficial to horses, and its extension is 
attributed to the horse-breeding Persians, more particularly to the 
wars of King Darius. This report is confirmed by the Persian 
name for the lucerne-clover, aspest, literally horse-fodder, as well as 
by the high tax laid upon the cultivation of the plant by the 
Sassanid King Chosroes I. about the middle of the sixth century. 
Noldeke. in his history of the Persians and Arabians at the time 
of the Sassanides, translated from the Arabic chronicle of the 
Tabari, says that in considering the fiscal treatment of the lucerne, 
the immense importance of horse-breeding in the true Iran must be 
remembered. Among the Greek authors, lucerne is first named 
by Aristophanes, and then as horse-fodder ; Aristotle mentions it 
repeatedly, but rather in a disparaging way : it was good for bees, 
but the first cuttings were worth nothing, and it deprived animals, 
particularly the ruminants, of their milk. The opinion held in 



LUCERNE. CYTISUS. 307 

Italy differed from the above in so far that it was thought feeding 
with lucerne caused sheep at least to give more milk (Varro). In 
the following century Columella is full of praise of the lucerne : 
" Once sown, it lasts ten years ; it is mown four times a year 
regularly, sometimes even six ; it does not exhaust the soil, but 
rather enriches it ; it makes lean cattle fat, and heals the sick ; 
one acre of it will keep three horses the whole year." Possessing 
all these qualities, it could not but be industriously planted, 
particularly in sunburnt districts that were dry in summer, and 
which, though producing fresh fodder sufficient for the climbing 
sheep, were barren for the horse and ox. The lucerne, having 
very deep roots, is not afraid of drought ; it is even now planted 
in Italy, though much more rarely than it was in ancient times ; 
the names given to it in different districts, besides medica, such 
as erba spagna, fieno £ Ungheria, seem to imply fresh importations 
in modern times. The Spanish mielga is only a corruption of 
Medica ; the equally Spanish alfalfa is derived from the Arabic, 
but perhaps means another plant. The French luzeme, which 
has been adopted in English and German (Provencal lauzerdo), is 
etymologically obscure, for a derivation from the Swiss canton 
Lucern, or the little Piedmontese town and river Luzerna, is not, 
as far as we know, historically confirmed. Probably the cultiva- 
tion of clover, which seems to have originated in Belgium, has 
interfered with that of Medicago saliva in the north of Europe. 

The cylisus, Medicago arborea, is a shrub whose foliage is 
unanimously praised by ancient poets and technical authors as 
both wholesome and pleasant to domestic animals. Like the 
mulberry-tree in silk districts and the tea-plant in China, it was 
cultivated solely on account of its leaves, and had to submit to 
being ruthlessly robbed of them at stated times. It was polled 
and kept low, the ever-plentiful new sprouts being principally 
used. It was good not only for animals, but for fowls and bees ; 
and its specific effect in increasing the quantity of milk was so 
striking, that even human nursing-mothers drank a decoction of 
the leaves, mixed with wine, to strengthen and further the growth 
of their offspring. It supplied green fodder for eight months in 
the year, and the dried leaves gave good nourishment during the 



308 ARBUTUS. MEDIC A. CYT1SUS. 

other four. At the same time the cultivation cost little, for the 
tree throve on the poorest soil, and was insensible to bad weather 
and climatic extremes. Columella and Pliny express themselves 
much in the above manner, and the latter adds, that it was all the 
more surprising that the cytisus was not more frequent in Italy. 
The plant is said to have appeared first in Kythnos, one of the 
Cyclades, and thence to have gained the other islands, and finally 
continental Greece and Italy. There is no report of its having 
reached Kythnos from any other place, nor at what time the first 
utilization and extension of the plant occurred. The word kytisos 
is found in one of the pseudo-Hippocratian writings, the period of 
which we cannot determine ; it then occurs in a fragment mention- 
ing the flowers used in a wreath, by the Comic poet Cratinus; and 
in the celebrated goat-chorus by the poet Eupolis. Aristotle and 
Theophrastus both mention the cytisus ; and an Athenian named 
Amphilochus wrote a treatise on that plant and the Medica, but 
we do not know when he lived. Some mention of the cytisus by 
Democritus does not prove a greater age, for the agricultural 
works that bore the name of that celebrated philosopher were 
later counterfeits. Perhaps the Isle of Kythnos acquired the 
name of being the first home of the cytisus or of its cultivation 
from a kind of etymological legend. The Greek kytisos looks like 
a native word, and may be akin to kotinos, the wild olive, and 
Latin cotinus, rhus cotinus ; but it may be derived from one of 
the languages or dialects of Asia Minor, perhaps like kerasos in 
relation to kraneia and coi'nits. In modern husbandry, as far as 
we know, the cytisus no longer plays any part, but it is an orna- 
mental garden-tree. The praises lavished on the tree by the 
Romans, who therein imitated the Greeks, perhaps merely express 
their pleasure at the newly invented fodder-culture in general, and 
its surprisingly beneficial and lasting effect on the prosperity of 
agriculture. 



THE OLEANDER. 

(nerium oleander.') 

In Greece and Italy, the oleander, or rose-laurel, not only adorns 
gardens, but fringes the roads and the dry beds of rivers with its 
fragrant rose-like blossoms and the faint brilliancy of its long 
evergreen leaves. Like many other plants of those countries, it 
halts midway between a cultivated and a wild state ; that is, when 
once introduced, it was able to help itself and adopt the appear- 
ance of a free child of nature. In such a state it was found by 
Pliny, who at first sight believed the little tree to be indigenous to 
Italy, but remembering its name, which is Greek, rhododendron, 
rose-tree, or rhododaphne, rose-laurel, he recognised that he had 
before him a stranger come straight from Greece. A contem- 
porary of Pliny, the physician Dioscorides, also knows and exactly 
describes the tree, which, while poisonous, yielded an effective 
medicine, and like the true laurel, and especially the rue, was an anti- 
dote against the bite of a serpent. " A well-known bush," continues 
the description, "which has longer and thicker leaves than the 
almond-tree. It grows in gardens, on coast-lands, and beside rivers ; 
its blossoms and leaves have a bad effect on dogs, asses, mules, and 
most quadrupeds; but, taken with wine, they are wholesome for men 
against the bite of animals, especially if mixed with rue ; but when 
the smaller animals, like goats and sheep, drink of this, they die." 
It was the general opinion, which is even now prevalent, that the 
oleander was hurtful to animals. Palladius even mentions a means 
of destroying mice by stopping up their holes and passages with 
oleander leaves ; and Lucian's laughable story of the transformed 
ass, who breaks hungry into a garden and is afraid of the oleanders 



3 io THE OLEANDER. 



growing there, is the origin of the name amazza Vasino (kill-ass), 
still used in South Italy. So in the Roman Imperial time the 
rose-laurel was as well-known and common as it is now. If we 
turn to the older Greeks, from whose language the names of the 
tree had come, we find not a hint of acquaintance with this very 
noticeable plant. In the long lists of plants observed or only 
casually mentioned by Theophrastus there is not one that re- 
sembles the oleander, for the plant growing on the Isle of Lesbos 
and elsewhere, and called euonymos, which is also deadly to sheep 
and goats, but has flowers like the white violet that " smell of 
murder" (which Pliny translates, pestem denuntians), is no other 
than the Euonymus latifolius, or spindle-tree. As little do we 
meet with any remark that could apply to the oleander in Aristotle, 
in the Comic poets, or any of the early poets and prose writers. 
The other Greek name, first used by Pliny and Dioscorides, 
nerion, might induce us nevertheless to attribute a great age to the 
plant in Greece ; for if it is connected with the tragic ndros, neros 
(flowing), with Nereus the water-god, and with the Nereids, 
goddesses of the wet element, and therefore signifies water-plant, 
it must belong to the early period of word-building out of which 
those antiquated witnesses in the shape of word and fable were 
transmitted to posterity. But though the oleander loves to weave 
its long flowery fringe on both sides of the brook, or of the pebbly 
ravine down which the torrent rushes perhaps only for a few hours, 
it is no real water-plant, but also climbs the mountains ; and is it 
possible that the pretty tree, with its almond-scented blossoms and 
its deadly leaves, should have been common in Greece so long 
without leaving a trace in literature and legend? We learn from 
a late author, Ptolemseus Chemius of Alexandria, who lived in the 
latter half of the first century a.d., and collected all kinds of 
legends, personal anecdotes, and curious traits (fragmentally kept 
in the library of Photius), that a rhododaphne grew on the grave of 
Amycus, and whoever ate of it became very handy with his fists. 
It is the same Amycus and the same grave mentioned before in 
connexion with the laurel. What was attributed there to the 
laurel, the quality of confusing the senses and stirring up strife, is 
here attributed to the oleander ; but we do not know how old this 



THE OLEANDER. 31: 



variation may be, nor from what obscure source Ptolemaeus may 
have derived it. All this makes it not improbable that the oleander 
migrated to Greece from Asia Minor, and especially from the 
Pontus, the fatherland of poisons and antidotes. There, for 
example, lived the Sanni, a people whose honey had a stupefying 
effect, the cause of which was believed to be the blossoms of the 
oleander bush, of which all the woods were full (note 76). — The 
oleander still grows luxuriantly in Asia Minor alongside the brooks 
and on the mountains. Further south, in the sphere of the Semitic 
races, the Arabs call it by names evidently derived from the Greek 
daphne, difna, difleh, defle, so that it cannot have been introduced 
there till they became acquainted with the Greeks. 

From all that has gone before, we may conclude that the oleander 
first came to Greece during the period between the time of Theo- 
phrastus and perhaps the last years of the Roman republic ; and. 
proportionately later into Italy. The oldest literary mention 
would be that in the Virgilian " Culex," if we could be sure that 
that poem was sl youthful production of him to whom it is ascribed 
(note 77). Leaving this aside, the name of the oleander first 
appears a century later in Scribonius Largus, while it is still wanting 
in Celsus; soon after, as already remarked, the plant is known to 
every one in Italy ; it was first planted in gardens as an ornament, 
then it propagated itself in the open country, and the more rapidly 
as it was spared by the goats and asses, those enemies to all young 
saplings ; and from that time the light-red oleander roses, mixed 
with the soft blue blossoms of the Vitex agnus, gleam like winding 
reddish ribbons on the twin banks of the mountain torrents of 
Southern Europe. But the people in Italy gradually changed the 
difficult Greek word rhododendron, with a leaning to laurus, into 
the modern oleandro, leandro, which passes current in all languages 
and even in scientific botany ; only the modern Greeks usually 
say pikrodaphne, bitter laurel. 



THE PISTACHIO. 

(P1STACIA VERA.) 

The delicious pistachio nut, which serves the confectioners and 
ice-cream makers, even in northern countries, as one of their finest 
ingredients, grows on a small tree with spicy-smelling leaves, and 
belonging to the family of the terebinthaceae. The nut is about 
the size of a hazel-nut, of an oval, three-sided figure, and contains 
a green, tight-fitting, almond-like kernel. The original home of 
the tree is the warmer part of Central Asia ; its name seems to be 
Persian (note 78). If we are not deceived, it was highly valued 
for its fruit in Semitic Syria in the time of the patriarchs, and 
again quite late, when the Roman republic was changed into an 
empire. But as the elder Greeks know nothing of the pistachio, 
commerce cannot have brought the fruit out of Asia in those early 
times. Only after Alexander the Great had opened the heart of 
that continent do we find the first notice in Europe of the tree and 
its nuts, which some compare to the almond, others to the pine- 
nut ; and it is not till the beginning of the first century a.d., that 
we hear of one Roman bringing the plant itself from Syria to Italy, 
and another at the same time to Spain. 

When Joseph's brethren, driven by famine, went for the second 
time to Egypt, they took with them costly presents to gain the 
favour of the vizier, whom they little suspected of being their 
brother. Among the " choice fruit of the land " mentioned on 
this occasion, there stand, side by side with almonds, batnim, 
translated in the Septuagint, the Vulgate, and the Arabic and 
Syriac versions, terebinth-berries ; but as these berries, though 
eaten in some districts, cannot be reckoned as dainties worth 
offering, Bochart tried to prove that what was meant was the 



THE PISTACHIO. 313 



pistachio-nut. Olaus Celsius agreed with him, and since then 
the matter appears settled. But one circumstance looks suspicious, 
namely, that after the time of Jacob and Joseph the tree seems to 
have vanished, the Greeks being unacquainted with it ; and that 
Theophrastus, evidently in consequence of Alexander's conquests, 
is the first to hear of this new and wonderful species of terebinth, 
and that too not from Syria, but from Bactria. Thus we cannot 
avoid speculating whether the tree was not first brought by the 
Persian, or even the Greek dominion into the neighbourhood of 
the town newly-founded by the Greco-Syrian kings, Bercea or 
Chalybon, now Haleb (Aleppo). The passage in Theophrastus 
runs as follows : " But it is said that there exists a terebinth, or a 
tree resembling the terebinth, which is exactly like the latter except 
that the fruit is different, being like the almond. This terebinth 
is found in Bactria, and bears nuts like almonds, only that the 
shells are not rough, and the kernels taste far better than almonds, 
so that the natives make a greater use of them." The description 
is correct, but the name is wanting. This does not appear till the 
following century, when it is mentioned by Nicander ; but still he 
makes the plant grow on the Indian river Choaspes, near Susa. 
The first person who mentions the Syrian pistachio, a century 
later still, is the stoic and historian Posidonius of Apamea in Syria, 
therefore a native : " In Arabia and Syria there also grow the 
persea and the so-called bistakio7i (therefore a new name), which 
bears a grape-shaped fruit, white-shelled and long, similar to 
tears (?), which hang one over another like grapes ; inside they 
are green, and, though inferior in taste to pine-kernels, have a 
finer smell" 

Later authors, such as Dioscorides, Pliny, Galen, etc., all know 
that Syria, and especially Aleppo, produces the fruit in perfection. 
Vitellius brought the tree to Italy, and the Roman knight Flaccus 
Pompeius at the same time to Spain. Lucius Vitellius, who was 
afterwards censor, was legate in Syria under Tiberius, and made 
use of his stay in that province to transport many of the native 
garden plants to his estate near Alba Fucensis. We are not told 
whether the pistachios flourished there ; but as Alba is not far 
from Lake Fucinus (the Lago Celano lately drained) amidst the 



314 THE PISTACHIO. 



rugged Marsian mountains, and as Northern and Central Italy are 
to this day too cold for the pistachio, Vitellius probably had but 
little joy of his importation. The tree could be more easily 
naturalized in Calabria and Sicily, which actually export the fruit, 
but it is not considered so aromatic as that of the East. As the 
pistachio, like all the terebinthacese, is a dioecious plant, the hand 
of the gardener secures its fructification by bringing the panicle of 
the male tree in contact with that of the female. It is very usual 
to improve the common turpentine-tree with a graft of the pistachio. 
Whether the Sicilian pistachios are derived from the time of 
Vitellius, or from Roman times at all, and whether they are due 
to the Arabian period, might be open questions, especially as the 
Sicilian fastuca resembles the Arabic name, were it not that 
Palladius in his books De Re Rustica repeatedly gives directions 
about the planting and cultivation of pistachios. He possessed, 
as he himself says, estates in Sardinia ; and the delicate Median- 
Syrian tree might well find a second home on that warm island. 
If the East had not so completely degenerated in horticulture, as 
in everything else, the planting of pistachio trees might be ex- 
tremely profitable among a people so passionately fond of sherbet 
and all kinds of sweets. The pistachio plantation of Aleppo is 
still celebrated far and wide. Polak says of Persia, " The inhabi- 
tants of Kaswin and Damgan exclusively cultivate pistachios, of a 
quality not to be excelled." In that country, therefore, we must 
seek for the home of the tree. 

The nearer and more distant relations of the pistachio belong 
to the characteristic vegetation of the Mediterranean ; there is the 
pistacia lentiscus i the so-called Mastich-tree, which is frequent in 
the shape of evergreen bushes on the coasts of South Italy ; there 
it produces no mastich, but only a coarse oil, at best fit for 
burning; the pistacia terebinthus or Turpentine-tree, which in 
Italy often sheds its leaves, and is only a true evergreen in the 
South, producing while in Europe neither turpentine nor edible 
berries ; the rhus cotinus or Periwig-tree (any one who has seen it 
after blossoming, when it looks like a tumbled head of hair, will 
know why it is so called) ; and lastly, the rhus coriaria, the true 
Sumach, whose leaves, dried and powdered, afford the best tan for 



TEREBINTH OR TURPENTINE. 315 

the fine dyed goat-skin leathers, morocco, and cordovan, now so 
largely manufactured in Sicily, and forming one of its most con- 
siderable exports. 

Whether these balsamic, evergreen, tan-containing trees or 
bushes, the ornaments of southern rocky coasts, belonged to the 
European flora from the very beginning, or whether, like the 
myrtle, they were first brought from Asia by the hand of man, and 
then went wild, is a matter of doubt. In Europe they cling to the 
warm southern seaboard of that continent, and do not venture far 
north as true Italian plants are wont to do ; they appear in the 
form of bushes, while their brothers in Asia grow into stately 
trees ; they produce no balmy resin, no edible fruit, no fragrant 
oil, or only in proportion as they approach the warmth of Asia ; 
sufficient reason for their introduction may be found in their 
medicinal virtues, their technical uses, the aromatic scent and 
taste of their resin and berries, and finally, religious superstition. 
Among them the sumach is technically the most important ; the 
terebinth historically the most interesting. The Turpentine-tree 
takes us back to the oldest times of Persia. The Persians are 
terebinth-eaters ; when Astyages, King of the Medes, sitting on his 
throne, witnessed the overthrow of his army by that of Cyrus, he 
cried, "Alas, how brave are these terebinth-eating Persians!" 
^Elian says, "The Arcadians eat acorns, the Persians terebinths." 
Among other laws engraved on a bronze column in the palace of 
the Persian kings was a list of the articles to be furnished daily 
for the royal table ; it includes terebinth-oil. The Persian youth 
were constrained to live in the open country and feed on terebinth- 
berries, acorns, and wild pears. Terebinths grew on the Paropa- 
misus. When Alexander marched to Bactriana, he passed through 
a terrible mountain wilderness, where no trees grew except tere- 
binth-bushes. In the time of Dioscorides, the tree, especially in 
the regions that form the dwelling-place of the Semitic races, 
furnished the highly-valued turpentine resin : " The resin of this 
tree comes from Arabia Petraea; but it also grows in Judsea, 
Syria, Cyprus, Libya, and the Cyclades ; " and still earlier Theo- 
phrastus had compared the strong, tall terebinth-trees near 
Damascus with the low terebinth-bushes of Mount Ida and 



316 THE PISTACHIO, 



Macedonia : " The terebinth is small on Mount Ida, and in Mace- 
donia twisted and like a bush, but near Damascus in Syria it is 
tall, stately, and frequent; it is said that in that place is a mountain 
covered with terebinths, near which nothing else will grow." In 
the Old Testament the tree has a religious significance, which 
increases the more the older the period in question. The berry- 
bearing terebinth, like the acorn-bearing oak, from which it cannot 
always be distinguished, is the primitive tree under which the 
Divine presence was revealed, the altar erected, and the sacrifice 
offered. Abram removed his tent, and came and dwelt under the 
terebinths of the plain of Mamre which is in Hebron, and built 
there an altar unto the Lord (Genesis xiii. 18). And there the 
Lord appeared unto him, and gave him His promise (Genesis 
xviii. i). The spot where Abram's tree had stood was sacred for 
many centuries after ; the terebinth there was said to be as old 
as the world ; Josephus says, " But six stadia from the town a 
very great terebinth was shown, which is said to have stood there 
since the creation of the world;" and Eusebius, "Therefore 
to the present day, the place is held sacred by the surrounding 
inhabitants, because of the vision beheld there by Abraham; 
and the terebinth is also still to be seen." Even Gentiles from a 
distance, Phoenicians and Arabs, gathered there and sacrificed 
animals, offered wine, and cast gifts into the spring; and, as usual, 
trade and barter were combined with the religious ceremonies. 
This worship of tree and spring was such an abomination, 
that the Emperor Constantine the Great, at the instance of 
his mother, St. Helena, caused the altar to be destroyed, the 
statues to be burnt, and a Christian chapel to be erected on the 
spot. Another sacred terebinth was that of Jacob at Shechem 
(Gen. xxxv. 4), under which, in Joshua's time, stood the ark of 
the covenant, and a stone altar was erected by that hero (Joshua 
xxiv. 26) ; there in the time of the Judges all the men of Shechem 
gathered together and made Abimelech king (Judges ix. 6). 
Again, the angel of the Lord came and sat under a terebinth- 
oak at Ophrah, and Gideon built there an altar, after he had cast 
down the Ashera of the Midianites (Judges vi. 11-27). The 
dead were buried under terebinth-oaks (Gen. xxxv. 8) : " But 



TEREBINTH. MASTIC H. 317 

Deborah, Rebekah's nurse, died, and she was buried beneath 
Beth-El under an oak (terebinth), and the name of it was called 
Allon-bachuth (the oak of lamentation)." In later times, when 
the worship of Jehovah had become more spiritual, the prophets 
are especially indignant that trees, among them the terebinth-oaks, 
are sacred in the eyes of the heathen, Hosea iv. 13: "They 
sacrifice upon the tops of mountains, and burn incense upon the 
hills, under oaks, and poplars, and elms (terebinths), because the 
shadow thereof is good;" and Ezekiel vi. 13: "Then shall ye 
know that I am the Lord, when their slain men shall be among 
their idols round about their altars, upon every high hill, 
in all the tops of the mountains, and under every green tree, 
and under every thick oak (terebinth)." This very veneration 
may have early contributed to the propagation of the tree on 
the coasts of Europe. But if, even in Asia, it yielded the costly, 
healing, pure turpentine in small quantities only, in Europe it 
altogether lost the power of secreting it, and was stunted in 
growth, except perhaps in some of the Greek islands, such as 
Chios. What was understood by the Romans, and now also, 
under the name of turpentine, is gained from the pinus picea or 
the larix, and of course does not come up to the genuine terebinth. 
The resin for violins, called Colophonium, bore the same name in 
antiquity, KolopJionia pissa, because, as Dioscorides reports, it was 
procured from Kolophon in Asia Minor. 

The Mastich-tree is first mentioned by Herodotus under the 
name of schinos. Its resin, mastiche, derived its name from the 
custom of chewing it (mastazo, to chew ; mastax, mouth), and the 
favourite tooth-picks were made of its wood. The inhabitants of 
Chio, where much mastich is produced, are constantly chewing 
this resin, which, they believe, not only sweetens their breath, but 
improves their health. The custom, like that of chewing betel- 
nuts, is part of the system of Eastern laziness, but may be honour- 
ably contrasted with the originally American but now world-wide 
habit of smoking tobacco. The Latin name of the tree lentiscus 
(from lentus) comes either from the tough and sticky quality of 
the resin, or from the flexibility of the branches, which are much 
used for riding- whips. 



318 THE PISTACHIO. 



The Periwig-tree, rhics cotinus, we find mentioned by Theo- 
phrastus under the name of kokkygea, sl tree that furnished a red 
dye, and whose identity with rhus cotinus is seen by his mentioning 
its fiappos, the large reddish tuft of the fruit-panicles, from which 
the tree takes its modern name. 

The Sumach^ rhus coriaria, is very early mentioned under the 
name of rhous ; for instance, by Solon at the beginning of the 
sixth century. The berries formed a spice, hedysnia, which im- 
proved the taste of food, like myrtle-berries, or like pepper and 
lemon in modern times. Erythros, red, is a frequent epithet of 
this fruit, and perhaps the name rhous is derived from the same 
root, and was formed either in Greece or in some kindred language 
of Asia Minor. Then the meaning would correspond to that of 
kokkygea, for the trees are nearly related. The leaves of the tree 
(which, from its native country is called by Celsus the rhus Syriacus) 
were used even by the ancients for tanning; but that it was planted 
in Sicily, where it now yields the finest crop, only after the 
Arab or Middle Greek period, is betrayed by the name sommaco, 
sumach, being exactly the same as the Arabic sommaq and 
Byzantine soumaki. The islands of Sicily and Sardinia, as well as 
many provinces of the Pyrenees peninsula, seem as if created for 
the cultivation of the sumach-tree ; for, like the Opuntia-cactus, it 
prefers barren rubble, and a dry rocky bottom to any other soil, 
and therefore finds in those regions almost unlimited space for 
propagation. Indeed, its cultivation has made enormous progress 
during the last generation; in the year 1875 Palermo exported 
sumach to t v he value of more than 17,000,000 lire. 

Among the means of fumigation, the thymia7iiata and aromata 
of the warmer parts of Asia, the ancients often mention the 
storax-resin (Greek styrax), which the Phoenicians of Herodotus's 
time exported to Greece. But perhaps the Phoenicians had also 
attempted in early times to plant this Syrian tree around their 
European colonies. It is true that Theophrastus, after mentioning 
the storax in his long list of Asiatic aromatic substances, adds 
directly after, that with the exception of the iris, none of them 
belonged to Europe. But near the Boeotian town of Haliartus, in 
a district about which there hang traditions of early Phoenician 



PERIWIG-TREE. SUMACH. STORAX. 319 

culture and religious intercourse with Crete, there grew Cretan 
storax-trees (Plat. Lys. 28, 7), not far from the spring Kissousa, 
in which his nurses bathed the new-born Bacchus ; and by this 
fact the Haliartians proved that Rhadamanthys had dwelt among 
them, and they could still point out his grave. Later on, storax 
still came from Crete, but was of course not considered the best 
kind. Probably the little trees of Haliartus produced no gum at 
all, but the wood may have served for lance-shafts. The Latinized 
form storax proves that this favourite incense for sacrifices came 
early to Italy, exactly as we drew the same inference from the 
Latin name for the quince-tree, which, according to the ancients, 
resembled the storax-tree. 



PEACH. APRICOT. 

(amygdalus persica.) (prunus armeniaca.) 

These two trees, as their names tell us, originated in the interior 
of Asia, beyond even the cherry-land, and became known in Italy 
during the first century of the Roman Empire. Neither Cato, 
Varro, Cicero, or any other author of the Republican period, nor 
any poet of the Augustan age, knew anything about them ; and 
the elder Greeks, so far as their writings are preserved, were just as 
ignorant. It was only when the Roman Empire, after the over- 
throw of Mithridates, began to extend, directly or indirectly, to 
the valleys of Armenia and the southern margin of the Caspian 
Sea ; and when the frontier between it and the Parthian kingdom 
began to fluctuate, and there was an exchange of warlike or 
peaceful relations, — then it was that the natural treasures of these 
strange and fertile regions were gradually disclosed, and bit by 
bit conveyed to Italy. The lemon, " which heavily lies like a 
golden ball," could be admired in the West before a European 
had ever beheld the tree as the bearded merchant at Archangel, 
next neighbour to the eternal snow, cuts fresh slices of lemon into 
his Chinese tea ; — not so the soft apricot and melting peach, for, 
as Pliny says, non aliud fugacius (nothing decays so rapidly). 
However, towards the middle of the first century a.d., gardeners 
with an eye to business had planted these fruit-trees in Italy, and 
took high prices for the first " Persian apples " and " Armenian 
plums " they produced. 

In the case of such rare, unknown, aristocratic fruits, which 
only gradually became familiar to the eye and tongue of the 
masses, and in the absence of a regular scientific system, it is not 



FEACIL APRICOT. 321 



surprising that the names should at first be very fluctuating, and 
not become fixed till later. At first it was only known that the 
peach and apricot came from beyond the Asia (in the narrower 
sense) of that time, and they were therefore called Persian fruits ; 
and apricots, which are similar and akin to plums, Armenian 
fruits as well. The name Persian gave rise to some confounding 
with the Egyptian Persea, and probably with the Median apple or 
lemon, and later authors had to contradict the superstitious or 
incorrect ideas caused by such mistakes. Then varieties were 
produced, the peculiar qualities of which were expressed by suit- 
able surnames ; thus the growers of the finest sort of peaches 
called them duracina, because they had a thicker skin, or firmer 
pulp ; and another kind, which ripened early, was named pra-coqua, 
oxprce-cocia. This last, a technical expression applied to many other 
things besides, the first portion of which exactly corresponds to the 
Greek proi, early, was especially suited to the Apricot-tree, which 
not only blossoms early like the almond, and is therefore pro'i- 
anthes, but also ripens its fruits early, pro'i-karpos (like the French 
hativeau s hasty pear) ; so the word became at last the regular 
name of the Apricot, and Dioscorides (60 a.d.) could say: "We 
Greeks call them Armeniaca, but the Romans prai-kokia." But, 
further, the Greeks took to borrowing some of these names that 
had become fixed in Italy ; for in the revolutions of time the 
movement had become retrograde, and Oriental products could 
come to Greece from the West, and then they passed them on to 
the East, which had originally itself possessed the things so dis- 
tinguished, but had become unconscious of the fact. (Peaches, 
for instance, of which the Romans had named the best kind 
duracina, were now called in Middle and Modern Greek rhodakina, 
doubtless a mere transposition of the Latin duracina, to which 
there was a further inducement in its resemblance to rhodon, rose.) 
Prce-coqua, then, was changed by the Middle Greeks into prekykkia, 
prokokkia, berekoka, etc. ; and, as the latter half of the word sounded 
like kokkos (berry), or kokkyx (cuckoo), it was even changed into 
kokko-melon (berry-apple), and melon kokkygos (cuckoo's apple), the 
old name of the plum. But out of one of those distorted forms 
of prcecoqua, the Arabs made, with the help of the article, their 



322 PEACH. APRICOT. 



al-barquq; and when that sherbet-sipping, refreshment-loving 
people began to lay out gardens in Spain, in the islands of the 
Mediterranean, and in South Italy, and to unload its wares in the 
harbours, the word came back to the Occidentals in its Arabic 
form, and thus completed its circle Lorn West to East and back 
again: Ital. albercocco, albicocco, bacocco, Span. albaricoque,fxom which 
the French abricot, from that again the German aprikose, etc. The 
word armeniacum has also been preserved in the Italian meliaca, 
muliaca, just as the old persicum in the modern forms persica, pesca, 
peche, peach, pfirsich, and in the Slavic dialects, breskva, praskva, 
broskvlna, etc. 

In the time of Pliny and Columella, there was already a kind 
of peach called the Gallic. It being rather remarkable that, in the 
very youth of the fruit, Gaul should have already produced a variety, 
it might be supposed that Gallo-Graecia in Asia Minor was meant ; 
but then it would surely have been called Galaticus, and not 
merely Gallicus. The peach is a fruit that easily changes ; accor- 
dingly a large kind of early peach had actually been produced in 
Provence, which the Italians named after the land of its birth. 
At present the fruit has divided into innumerable varieties, of which 
we will only mention the so-called Nectarines, pescanoci; which, 
as the ancients fabled, originated in the grafting of the peach on 
the walnut. Of all popular names for apricots the most interesting 
is the Neapolitan crisnommolo, derived from the Greek chryso-melon, 
golden apple. According to Pliny chrysomela was originally the 
name of a kind of quince ; when that fruit became rare and the 
apricot frequent and a favourite, the poetical name was transferred 
by the imaginative Neapolitans to a variety of the latter fruit, 
namely, the so-called almond-apricot. 



FRUIT-CULTURE. IMPING, GRAFTING. 

If we look back on the long series of fruit-bearing trees with 
which Italy was enriched during the period of its greatest power 
and glory — improved apples and pears, figs and pomegranates, 
quinces and almonds, cherries, peaches, mulberries, plums, 
pistachios, etc. — we are not astonished that Varro should call Italy 
a great fruit-garden. This transformation was accomplished during 
the time when Rome rose to be the centre of Italy, and Italy the 
ruler of the world. The older Greeks were only acquainted with 
Italy as a country which, compared with their own and with the 
East, still bore a primitive character, and whose products 
consisted chiefly of corn, wood, and cattle. The Comic poet 
Hermippus, who wrote at the beginning of the Peloponnesian 
war, could only mention barley and beef as Italian exports. In 
Thucydides vi. 90, where Alcibiades points out to the Lacedae- 
monians the advantages of an expedition to Sicily and Magna 
Graecia, he appeals to Italy's wealth in corn and in timber for 
ship-building A century and a half later, Theophrastus counts 
Italy among the few countries that supply such timber. When 
Hiero II. of Syracuse launched the monster grain-ship so often 
mentioned in this book, no tree could be found suitable for the 
main-mast except in the mountains of Brettium (that is, in the 
forest of Sila, which now consists of larch-pines ; but, as the 
finder of the tree was a swineherd, the larches must have been 
mixed with oaks or beeches). The wood is minutely described by 
Dionysius of Halicarnassus. In all Roman legends and traditions 
we hear of vast, inhospitable woods. The Ciminian forest near 
modern Viterbo, north of the Roman Campagna, in the South 
Etruscan region, is described by Livy as being in the year 308 



324 FRUIT-CULTURE. IMPING, GRAFTING. 

B.C. — therefore after the time of Alexander the Great — more ter- 
rible and impassable than the German forests afterwards trod by 
the Romans. At the beginning of the Second Punic War, when the 
praetor C. Manlius marched to the relief of Mutina (Modena), 
which the Boii were besieging, his army was almost annihilated in 
the pathless woods. 

And now, on the very site of these wildernesses with their produce 
in timber, pitch, game, and pasture, stood plantations of Oriental 
fruit-trees ; in the place of the flesh and pulse diet of the ancients, 
men sucked the juices of refreshing fruits as in the South and the 
East. Those who contributed to this transformation were chiefly 
Asiatics themselves, that is slaves and freedmen native to Asia ; 
Syrians, Jews, Phoenicians, and Cilicians. Italy was crowded with 
them long before Juvenal, who figuratively complained that things 
had got so far that the Syrian Orontes flowed into the Tiber. The 
Semitic slaves, with their industry, endurance, and patient resig- 
nation, seemed to be created for their condition. Plautus already 
speaks of Syrians as " the most patient race of men. " Rude warfare 
was not in their nature; but skill in gardening, a delight in the quiet, 
loving occupation of training and tending plants, were a birthright 
of the Aramaic race, or rather the result of a world-old culture, and 
of the soil on which it had been developed. When the Roman 
aristocrats, returning home after their year's stay in those Eastern 
provinces, wished to have any of the fine fruits they had always 
had on their tables there brought over to Italy and their own 
villas, they found experienced gardeners enough, who assisted in 
transporting and planting them, and received their freedom, or 
at least a milder treatment, in return. The same talent in the 
Cilicians was in every one's mouth, after Virgil — in the beautiful 
and much-admired episode in the fourth book of his Georgics — had 
praised the garden of the old Corycian near Tarentum, and the 
quantity of fruit and vegetables he had enticed out of the sterile 
soil. 

But the Syrian slaves brought with them, besides other sensual 
perversions of the East, the Oriental subtleties in the treatment 
of animals and plants. Not only castration, circumcision, and 
the breeding of mongrel beasts, but the lopping and dwarfing of 



TAMPERING WITH NATURE. 325 

trees, and crossing of species by imping and grafting, had been early 
practised in Syria. Purposely produced monstrosities, a careful 
perpetuation of freaks of nature, an artful sporting with the power 
of growth — all this was indeed only the same impulse in a 
depraved form as that which originally made the olive and the 
date-palm fruitful, invented the caprification of the fig, produced 
double roses and violets, and so on. In the gardens of Italy, 
from the time of Cato to the period when trees were deformed by 
being dipt into the shapes of animals, etc., persistent attempts 
were made, not so much to express the pure feeling of Nature, 
as to cunningly seduce her, by strange and foreign ways, into 
producing forms and ends which she never intended. Tall trees 
were dwarfed, delicate fruits grown in monstrous size, and what 
could not be actually accomplished was at least pretended, and 
represented as possible. The gradual increase of this tendency 
is clearly shown in ancient works on the subject. Varro only 
went so far as to believe that pear and apple trees could be grafted 
on each other, but not that a pear could grow on an oak. In 
Virgil the strawberry-tree already bears nuts, the plane-tree apples, 
the chestnut beech-nuts, the ash pears, and the elm acorns. 
Columella says, first, that grafting is only possible where the bark 
of both trees is similar ; yet presently he blames the ancients for 
limiting the possibility of success to trees of a similar kind : rather 
might any sprig be grafted on any tree; and then comes the descrip- 
tion of a trick by which a fig-tree could be made to produce a branch 
of olive. Pliny professes to have seen a tree that bore on its different 
branches nuts, olives (daces), grapes, pears, figs, pomegranates, and 
several sorts of apples, all at once. Lastly, there is scarcely a tree 
mentioned by Palladius or in the collection of the Geoponica, of 
which it is not said that it can be made to bear such and such 
alien fruits. Pliny is quite shocked at this misleading and misusing 
of nature, as a kind of sacrilege. It is true, he was only a compiler ; 
burdened by his task and the immense quantity of his material, 
he could not always be exact ; his style is affected, and hence 
often obscure ; still he not rarely shows a lofty spirit, and in the 
present case expresses the tragic feeling of a life completed on all 
sides and thoroughly exhausted of its contents. Italy, he means 



326 FRUIT-CULTURE. IMPING, GRAFTING. 

to say, has gathered to herself all the plants of the world and tried 
upon them, with the utmost exertion of skill, all the formative and 
creative powers of nature ; — What is there to expect ? what more 
can come but nothingness ? And, in fact, there came the thousand 
years of the Middle Ages, and in Syria the man had already arisen, 
whose teaching poured like a destructive foreign substance through 
all the veins of the Greco-Roman world, the true ex ossibus ulior, 
and not only for the burning of Carthage, Syria's daughter. So 
far as the old religion still survived, it also opposed this sporting 
with organic nature : trees that bore two kinds of boughs brought 
errors into the ritual for exorcizing and appeasing the lightning; 
and this scruple may have deterred nany from such attempts. In 
the same spirit the Mosaic Law had once forbidden the pairing of 
what was dissimilar, the breeding of mongrels, the mixing of 
woollen and linen in one garment, the yoking together of ox and 
ass, and the sowing of a field with two kind of seed (Leviticus 
xix. 19). — Nevertheless, the eager effort at grafting and inocula- 
tion, crazy though it might be when it exceeded natural limits, 
contributed to increase the manifold variety and perfection of the 
now naturalized fruits. Fruit, that original ready-made food of 
man, who is beautifully developed only in zones where fruit trees 
flourish, was not only propagated and improved throughout Italy, 
and became what it is to the present day, a necessary part of even 
the poor man's daily meal ; but also crossed the Alps to Central 
and Western Europe, wherever the climate, assisted by the fore- 
sight and industry of civilized men, permitted and even favoured 
its culture. The soil and climate of France now produce the 
finest fruit ; England has carried this branch of cultivation also to 
the highest degree, and Germany follows at some distance the 
example of those two countries. 

Tacitus found Germany too cold for fruit growing, and says that 
its inhabitants nourished themselves on wild berries, fresh game, 
and curdled milk ; and, in fact, to this day North Germany cannot 
produce Italian figs, almonds, and peaches in the open air. In 
the Danube region most kinds of fruit thrive well, and the 
exportation thence of fresh and dried fruits to the German 
Empiie already amounted, some years ago, to about 300,000 



GRAFTING. 327 



cwt., of the value of at least nine million marks. But the 
farther it travels north-east into the region of extremes of climate, 
with rigid winters and spring frosts, the more the fruit tree 
dwindles. In the villages of Muscovy Proper it never occurs to 
the peasants to plant a tree, or hope to celebrate a joyful pear or 
apple-harvest in autumn. Modern Europe has given up the 
attempt to graft nuts on oaks and the like ; it also does not try to 
improve vines by inoculation as Cato did ; it operates by judicious 
selection and tendance, and picks out the proper fruit for each 
locality. In speaking of each kind of fruit, we saw that those of 
Central Europe derived their names from Italy ; and the same is 
true, for the most part, of the nomenclature of improving pro- 
cesses. The word impotus in the " Lex Salica," for imp or graft, 
Old High Germ, impiton, Middle High Germ, impfeien, Modern 
Germ, impfen, French ente, enter, Provencal entar, are all derived 
from the Greek em-phytos, em-phyteuo, in-plant. If we notice the 
regions over which this word extends — among Italian dialects it 
occurs in those of Piedmont, Parma, and Modena — we can easily 
believe that the invention it designates came to the Celtic inhabi- 
tants of Western Upper Italy and of the Rhone, and thence to the 
districts of the Upper and Lower Rhine, from some Greek seaport 
— and who can help thinking, first and foremost, of Massilia? 
The French and English greffe, greffer, graff, graft, seem also to 
have come from a Greek source (Diez). A second German word, 
pfropfen, to graft, pfropf-reis, a graft, leads direct to Italy and the 
Latin propago ; and a third, pelzen, is from the Provencal empeltar, 
which itself is formed from pellis, the skin, i.e., the rind of the 
tree. Not less interesting than these living witnesses to the in- 
fluence of the classic South on cultivation, is a native Gothic word 
used several times by Ulfilas, in the eleventh chapter of the 
Epistle to the Romans, for the Greek enkentrizein, namely, in- 
trisgan, intrusgjan. It is wanting in all the other German dialects, 
but is found again in Slav countries, and is thus one of the signifi- 
cant instances of borrowing from the Slavic by an East German 
language. The meaning of trisgan was to slit, and of in-trisgan 
to insert in a slit. In the Slavic language there is developed, from 
this idea of splitting or bursting, that of crashing, also that of 



328 FRUIT-CULTURE. IMPING, GRAFTING, 

lightning, as the splitting thunderbolt — New Slav, tresnoti, Russ. 
tresnuti, Bulg. tresk, Croat, triskati, etc.; and the Lithuanian 
trukis, trukti, seems to be the same word ; perhaps also the Greek 
terchtios, trechnos, a branch. The same change of meaning from 
splitting to grafting is seen in another Slavo-Lithuanian root — 
Slav, cepati, ceputi, to split, cep, a graft ; Lithu. czepiti, to graft, etc. 



THE AGRUMI, OR ORANGE GROUP. 

The fancy of the Northerner, who, like all Hyperboreans for these 
two thousand years and more, longs for the beautiful South, is 
chiefly attracted by the golden fruit hanging on the Hesperian 
trees, a fruit which in his own foggy land he only receives wrapped 
up in paper at the mariner's or merchant's hand. And, in fact, 
what garden-tree can rival the orange in beauty and nobility? 
Tall and stately where the climate is mild enough and the 
soil rich, with dark, shining evergreen leaves, with snow-white 
flowers that smell like lilies, and blossom the whole year long ; 
hung with fruits greenish at first, then ripening by degrees to 
brightest gold ; whose rind, filled with volatile oil, has a penetrating 
odour, and whose taste varies according to the kind, from balsamic 
bitterness and strong but fine acidity to the sweetest nectar; 
with close, firm wood, and a length of life that far exceeds that of 
man — in what other tree of the South is the power of the sun, the 
soft breath of Zephyr, and the splendour of the sky, so concen- 
trated and vegetatively represented, as in the Aurantiacese ? 

Every traveller who is happy enough to have seen the lemon- 
grove in the neighbourhood of Poros in the Peloponnesus, the 
agrumi of Messina at the foot of Etna, and those of Reggio on the 
opposite coast of Calabria, the gardens of Sorrento near Naples, 
and the enchanting orange-woods of Milis in the island of 
Sardinia, thinks of them ever after with delight. 

The agrumi grove of Poros, about four miles square, stretches 
down the gentle slope of the mountains to the plain below, and 
from its lofty edge affords a splendid view over land and sea and 
towery cliffs ; it is watered by springs from the mountains, divided 
into innumerable rills ; the trees stand close enough for the 
boughs to touch, and they number about thirty thousand. The 



330 THE AGRUMI, OR ORANGE GROUP. 

orange trees of Milis are briefly but charmingly described by 
Alfred Meissner, in his " Durch Sardinien " : " There are above 
three hundred orange gardens around Milis ; the two largest 
belong to the Cathedral Chapter of Oristano and the Marquis of 
Boyle. I was taken first to one and then to the other. Both are 
small forests formed entirely of orange trees. Freely left to nature 
the tree has lost its stiff globular form ; it stretches its boughs on 
all sides, and on its crown shine the golden fruit, the silvery 
blossoms. One walks under an uninterrupted, shadowy, glimmer- 
ing roof of leaves. A thick carpet of fallen orange blossoms 
covers the ground; little brooks are led past the mighty black 
roots, and their murmur mingles with the song of the birds that 
dwell in the boughs. In this grove of the Hesperides you can 
walk freely, bending the boughs aside, which, rebounding, shower 
their blossoms in your face, or envelope you in an intoxicating 
cloud of perfume as you lie beneath in the shade of orange trees 
as grand as their brethren of the forest. The orange groves of 
Milis, possessed by different owners, contain altogether 500,000 
trees. They yield on the average twelve million oranges a year. 
In the garden of the Chapter there is a tree which alone is said to 
bear annually more than five thousand oranges. The gardener, a 
priest, assured me that there were many trees whose age was 
proved to be above seven centuries. The patriarch of them all 
stands in the Marquis of Boyle's garden. Its trunk is so thick that 
a man cannot encircle it in his arms ; its crown is as majestic as 
that of an oak. The walk through the orange woods of Milis 
seemed alone worth the journey to Sardinia. Sitting in a pavilion 
in the highest garden, I saw the most glorious of Campagnas 
stretching out for miles ; the pleasant scene was magically illu- 
minated by a beautiful sunset." The charming Puerto de Soller 
in the island of Majorca is said to equal Milis in the beauty and 
richness of its orange culture. There the gardens are situated on 
terraces, cut in the hot debris of the precipices, over which rush 
winter torrents. The towering rocks around reflect the heat, and 
the sun can penetrate the bottom of the valley, while a small river 
sends its threads of water to all sides through little water-channels 
and aqueducts. The annual exportation from the port of Soller is 



ORANGE. LEMON. 331 



said to amount to more than fifty millions of extraordinarily sweet 
oranges, which in 1867 were worth about a million francs when 
placed on shipboard, and about four millions when arrived at their 
destination. Unfortunately the gum-sickness has made great 
havoc among the oranges of Majorca during the last few years. 

However, all these are only oases in Southern Europe, which is 
far from being a true orange country. The tourist must distinctly 
aim at it if he desires to indulge in the momentary enjoyment or 
enchanting illusion of a natural Hesperian forest. In Greece 
orange and lemon culture is neither carried on to any extent worth 
speaking of, nor is the fruit of any particular excellence ; on the 
contrary, it is sometimes very dry, with a thick rind, sometimes 
sour or bitter. In North Italy, on the riviera di Salo, or west 
shore of the Lake of Garda, the so-cailed giardini, so pretty in 
summer, are after all protected by walls, and at the beginning of 
winter are further sheltered by a tile roof and side-walls of planks. 
It is true that the lemon-tree is frequently met with in the gardens 
of North and Central Italy, but always planted in large earthen- 
ware pots. In Sicily, though so warm, the dry summers and 
stormy winters are hurtful to the orange-tree, which therefore, 
except in a few favoured spots, is entirely wanting on the western 
and southern coasts. As this natural scarcity is apt to disappoint 
the expectant traveller, so is the historical youth of the tree in 
Europe, for it was quite unknown to the ancients in their best 
period, and only half known to later antiquity. The golden 
apples that Hercules received from Atlas, and those other Aphro- 
disian apples that made Atalanta halt in the race with her beauti- 
ful lover, were not mala citria as the ancients afterwards believed, 
still less were they oranges as we moderns have often dreamed. 
At the time of the introduction of such Oriental nature-myths, they 
were thought of as real — though idealized — apples, quinces, or 
pomegranates. Only when Alexander the Great, by his invasions 
and by setting up a Greek empire in the heart of Asia, had lifted 
the veil which hid the interior of that continent, did the European 
Greeks hear of a wondrous tree with golden fruit growing in 
Persia and Media. Then Theophrastus wrote his celebrated 
description of the tree, which was repcateJ, imitated, and made 



332 THE AGRUMT, OR ORANGE GROUP. 

an authority for five hundred years. "The East and South," 
says he, "possess peculiar animals and plants; Media and Persia, 
among other things, the so-called Median or Persian apple-tree. 
It has leaves like those of the andrachle, and sharp thorns ; the 
apples are not eaten but smell sweet, as do the leaves also ; if 
the fruit is laid among clothes, it protects them from moths ; if 
any one has taken poison, it is an antidote ; if you boil it and 
squeeze out the flesh into your mouth and swallow it, it improves 
the breath ; the pips are planted in carefully dug beds, and 
watered every four or five days ; when the plants are grown, they 
are moved in spring to a soft, damp, and not too light soil ; the 
tree bears fruit all the year round, and is adorned with blossom, 
ripe fruit and unripe, all at the same time ; those blossoms that 
have a kind of spindle in the centre are fruitful, the others not ; 
the tree is also planted in earthenware vessels with holes, as palms 
are." — The only thing that strikes one in this careful description, 
written however at a distance, is, that the size, form, colour, and 
nature of the fruit itself is not more exactly described. Had 
Median apples been brought to Athens, and were they already 
familiar to Theophrastus's readers ? Such a thing is hinted at in 
a fragment by the poet Antiphanes, whose date is somewhat 
doubtful ; probably about the time of Alexander the Great. 

A. Here, maiden, take these apples. 

B. Beauties, too ! 

A. The seeds came lately from the Great King's land. 

B. Nay, from the Hesperides ! 

A. Well, they do say 
These are the " golden apples." 

B. Only three! 
A. The beautiful is always scarce and dear. 

As the Persian Empire is thought of as still standing, and as during 
Alexander's expedition there was constant communication between 
Greece and the army in Asia, it is quite possible that Persian 
apples may have found their way to Athens in those very years. 
They are still a novelty exciting admiration, and compared to the 
fruit of the Hesperides. After the foundation of the Greek 
kingdoms in the heart of Asia, the Hesperian fruit no doubt 



LEMON. ORANGE. 333 



frequently appeared in the European markets; but still it was 
thought unfit to be eaten, and beautiful as it looked outside, the 
juice was disagreeable to the taste. The belief in its quality of 
destroying vermin, improving the breath, and rendering poison 
ineffectual, was also general in the West, as it had been in the 
East. Virgil's description of the tree and the fruit (Georg. 2, 126) 
is only a poetical imitation of Theophrastus : he calls the Median 
apple felix, lucky, because it counteracts the creatures of the Evil 
Spirit, such as poison, vermin, and impure breath ; but its juice 
is tristis, i.e., biting, and its taste tardus, i.e., long retained. 
Where a superstition is strongly held, all experiments will of 
course confirm it. At Athenseus's imaginary "Banquet" of 
Deipnosophists (kitchen-connoisseurs), it is asserted "on good 
authority " that in Egypt criminals who happened to have tasted 
such fruit became impervious to the attacks of wild animals and 
poisonous snakes; that of two criminals condemned to death, 
one was provided with the antidote and the other not, and that 
the latter was killed on the spot by the bite of a snake, while the 
former escaped unhurt ; and that the same experiment had been 
frequently made with the same result. When the Deipnosophists 
heard that, they applied themselves diligently to the Median 
apples on the table, scarcely, we may add, for the sake of the 
taste, and probably with many grimaces. 

The second property of the fruit, that of driving away vermin, 
gave rise to the Latin name citrus, malum citreum, etc. The 
Greek word kedros, signifying the scented wood of the coniferse 
(cedar, arbor-vitae, etc.), which was not only itself impervious to 
worms, but protected clothes from them — this kedros was changed 
in Italy by popular corruption into citrus (as kydonia was into 
cotonea, quince, Eurydike into Euretice, dada into tceda, etc.). 
Citrus meant especially the wood of the Arbor vitce, or Thuja 
articulata, which had from olden times been imported from Africa, 
and of which, in later days of wealth and luxury, costly tables 
were made. This wood, with its aromatic scent, preserved the 
clothes- chests of the wool-wearing ancients from their hereditary 
enemy, the moth. From this custom of laying bits of thuja and 
other woods among woollen tunics is possibly derived the expres- 



334 THE AGRUMIy OR ORANGE GROUP. 

sion citrosa vestis, i.e., citrus-smelling dress, used already by Nsevius 
in his epic of the Second Punic War. As the golden Median 
apple was laid among clothes for the same purpose — and the 
custom was continued into the beginning of the second century a.d. 
— and as the smell of the rind was similar to that of cedar-resin, the 
common people imagined it to be the fruit of the citrus-tree, and 
gave it that name, which was gradually adopted by educated 
people and even by the Greeks. Galen laughs at the learned 
affectation of saying " Medicon melon,'' instead of the universally 
intelligible " kitrion." His contemporary, the African Apuleius, 
who wrote a work "De Arboribus," still protested against the custom 
of calling the tree with the Median apples a citrus, the two trees 
being essentially different. But the name had become too fixed 
in popular language to be abolished, especially at a time which 
was characterized by a reaction from the pedantic to the popular. 

But since when was the tree itself cultivated in Italy, and what 
species of the genus citrus was it to which belonged the fruit that 
was looked upon as the Hesperian apple, first in Athens, then in 
Italy, and, as Juba of Mauritania says, also in Libya ? 

If the elder Greek and Roman writers had ever seen the tree 
with their own eyes in Europe, they would not have held so lon^ 
and so exclusively by Theophrastus's description of it ; and still 
less would the name citrus ever have been applied to it. Pliny 
repeats the whole description of Theophrastus, with some additions, 
from which it appears that attempts had been made to cultivate 
the tree, but, as is often the case with first attempts, they had 
failed. Little trees had been planted in earthenware pots, but 
they had not thriven, or, at least, had borne no fruit. Another 
passage in Pliny speaks of it as domos etiam decorans. In what 
manner was this Median tree used to adorn the houses ? Was it 
grown in tubs between the pillars of the hall, or was it only the 
fruit that was placed as an ornament on tables and cornices, and 
as felix malum to keep off the demons of destruction ? We find 
that, a century or a century and a half after Pliny, the tree must, 
at least, have been planted in the villas and gardens of favoured 
districts. Florentinus, who lived in the beglining of the third 
century a.d., describes the cultivation of the kitreai in a manner 



ORANGE. LEMON. 335 



that shows it to have been exactly similar to that practised nowa- 
days in North Italy, for example, in the giardini on the Lake of 
Garda : the trees were planted on the south side of walls running 
east and west, they were covered in winter with mats {psiathoi), etc. 
" Rich people," he adds, " who can afford the expense, plant 
them under colonnades, along walls that are exposed to the sun ; 
water them well, let the heat of the sun have full effect, and cover 
them up when winter approaches." This was only hot-house 
cultivation. Palladius, who lived in the fourth or perhaps the fifth 
century a.d., speaks of lemon-trees in Sardinia and near Naples, 
that is, in warm districts, where the air was tempered by the sea, 
and where the ground was fertile and well-watered : there the 
trees grew winter and summer in the open air, and the hitherto 
merely traditional, semi-legendary conception of the tree could 
be corrected by actual sight. It was then found that it really 
brought forth blossom and fruit continually, as Theophrastus had 
asserted. Thus, in the course of the first Christian centuries, the 
evergreen tree which bore the golden apple was naturalized com- 
pletely in Italy — first in pots, with doubtful success ; then protected 
by walls on the north, and covered up in winter ; and, finally, 
in the open air — proving by one more example that the Imperial 
epoch of rapid and irrevocable decay had, nevertheless, in some 
branches of human development that are less generally regarded, 
contributed to progressive development, and to the exchange and 
technical utilization of the natural products of the most various 
countries. 

Now if it be asked, what kind of Aurantiaceae are to be 
understood by the Median apple and the arbor citri? we may con- 
fidently reply, the real Citron, citrus Medica cedra ; and this for 
many reasons. First of all, this immense thick-rinded fruit, with only 
slightly sour, and, in some varieties, rather sweet pulp or juice, is 
still called cedro in Italy. Secondly, the citron-tree is still found in 
the Persian province of Gilan, a part of ancient Media, bearing 
the characteristics mentioned by Theophrastus, i.e., provided with 
many sharp thorns. Thirdly, accidental allusions in the ancients 
to the shape, consistency, and eatableness of the Median apple 
correspond only to the true citron : Dioscorides calls it epimekes % 



336 THE AG RUM I, OR ORANGE GROUP. 

oblong, and errhytidomenon, wrinkled ; the fruit is boiled with 
wine or honey, it is edible and is not edible ; it is so large that 
Apicius says each single fruit is put into a separate pot ; in vas 
citriim mitte, gypso suspende (some think that a kind of pumpkin 
is meant); while yet unripe, it is surrounded with an earthen- 
ware cover, into which it grows and the shape of which it takes; 
the flesh, that is, the thick white rind, of which almost the whole 
fruit consists, is spoken of as the chief part — all features that 
exactly correspond to the citrus Medico, cedra. And, lastly, all the 
other kinds of Hesperides' fruit have names that exclude any 
doubt as to their having been introduced much later. The Lemon 
— which the Germans wrongly call citrone — a smaller and rather 
roundish fruit, with a thin aromatic rind and abundance of sour 
juice, is so called after the Arabic limtin, which word is derived 
from the Persic, and the Persian word from the Indian, which 
sufficiently indicates its origin, the road it travelled, and the period. 
In the time of Charlemagne there grew on the shores of Lake 
Como — past which at that time a high-road led from Italy to Chur 
and the Valley of the Rhine — besides olives, pomegranates, laurels, 
and myrtles, also the Persian apple, called citreon; Paulus Diaconus 
said that it excelled them all in its perfume, and this quality, as 
well as its name, points it out as having been the thick-rinded 
citrus Medica cedra. Two hundred years later, about iooo a.d., 
when the Prince of Salerno was besieged by Arabs, and relieved 
by forty Normans who were returning from the Holy Land, he 
sent ambassadors to Normandy with " poma cedrina, a??iigdalas 
quoque, et deauratas nuces," to induce the Normans to come and 
help to defend such a beautiful and fertile country {chronica Montis 
Cassiniensis ; in the Old French translation, by Amatus of Monte 
Cassino, the poma cedrina are called citre). At that time, then, 
only the citron of the ancients grew in South Italy. When Jacobus 
de Vitriaco — Bishop of Accon, afterwards of Tusculum, and a 
cardinal, who died at Rome 1240 — described the wonderful pro- 
ductions of the Holy Land, the lemon-tree cannot yet have existed 
in Europe, for he expressly includes it among the Palestinian 
plants that were foreign to Europe. The same author found 
the paradise-apple tree^-French pa/np/emousse, Italian porno di 



LEMON. ORANGE. 337 



Paradiso or d'Adamo — under this last name in Palestine. The 
fruit of this tree is the same as that still used by the Jews of all 
countries at their Feast of Tabernacles, and in many parts of Italy 
it was cultivated solely for that purpose. So it was the Crusaders, 
or the traders to Italian ports, or the Arabs during their invasions, 
or in their colonies on the islands and coasts of the Mediterranean, 
that brought over the lemon, whose intense acidity was valued both 
in Europe and the East as a piquant addition to many dishes ; 
which rendered foul water drinkable, and, when mixed with 
sugar, which just then made its appearance, formed the delicious 
limonata, or lemonade. — To the same Arab period Europe owes 
the Orange, citrus aurantium amarum; Italian arancio, melarancio; 
French orange. Originally this tree, with its glowing red-golden 
and bitterly aromatic fruit, and its wonderfully fragrant blossoms, 
had migrated to Persia from its native home, India (Persic ndreng) ; 
thence to the Arabs (Arabic ndrang) ; then farther to Europe 
(Byzantine nerantzion). In the little essay by Silvestre de Sacy, on 
the history of the Aurantiacece among the Arabs, there is the 
following important historic testimony of Masoudi as quoted 
by Makrizi : Makrizi dit, " Masoudi rapporte dans son histoire, 
que le citron rond (the orange) a ete apporte de PInde poste- 
rieurement a Van 300 de Vhegire (August, 912 a.d.); qitil fut 
d'abord seme dans VOman. De id, ajoute-t-il, ilfut porte a Basra 
en Irak et en Syrie, et il devint tres commun dans les maisons 
des habitants de Tarse et autres villes frontieres de la Syrie, d 
Antioche, sur les cotes de Syrie, dans la Palestine et en Egypte. 
On ne le connaissait point auparavant. Mais il perdit beaucoup de 
Vodeur suave et de la belle couleur qicHl avail dans Vlnde, parcequHl 
n^avait plus ni le meme climat, ni la meme terre, ni tout ce qui est 
particulier a ce pays" During its further migration to Europe 
it must of course have lost still more of its sweet perfume and 
beautiful colour, which the Arabs already missed in it in Western 
Asia. In some Italian dialects, and in Spanish, the initial n of 
the Arabic word is still preserved ; the idea of or, aurum, gave to 
the French word orange its somewhat deviating form ; in ora?ige 
already lies the gold-orange of Goethe. Jacobus has the word 
already in a French form, orenges. Albertus Magnus, in his book 

22 



338 THE AGRUMI, OR ORANGE GROUP. 

" De Vegetabilibus," written shortly before 1256, not long after the 
time of Jacobus, blames those who use the name arangus for the 
cedrus (the citron-tree of the ancients). According to Amari's 
"Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia,"the via de Arangeriis in the neigh- 
bourhood of Patti, mentioned in a diploma of 1094, was an avenue 
of orange-trees : so the name and the fruit must have been already 
introduced into Sicily by the Arabs before the Crusades. 

The sweet orange, citrus aitrantium duke, is still younger in 
Europe. Here, too, its history and course of migration is shown 
by the German name apfelsina, i.e., apple of China, and by the 
Italian portugallo. It was the Portuguese who, when their com- 
merce had extended to the seas of Eastern Asia, brought the 
sweet orange from Southern China to Europe, it is said in the 
year 1548, and the first European specimen stood long after in the 
house of Count de St. Laurent, at Lisbon. The Jesuit Le Comte, 
who had lived a long time in China, alludes to this in his "Nouveaux 
memoires sur l'etat present de la Chine," Paris, 1679 : "On les 
nomme en France orange de la Chine, parceque celles que nous 
vimes pour la premiere fois en avaient ete apportees. Le premier et 
unique or anger, duquel on dit qu'elles so fit toutes venues, se conserve 
encore a Lisbonne dans la maison du Comte S. Laurent, et dest aux 
Portugais que nous sommes redevables d'un si excellent fruit." 
Ferrari (Hesperides, Romse, 1646) still calls the orange Auran- 
tium Olysiponense, orange of Lisbon, and adds that it was sent 
from thence to Rome ad Pios et Barberinos hortos. The last words 
are a compliment to Pope Urban VIII., Barberini, in whose 
pontificate Ferrari wrote his book ; the gardens of the Pii could 
only be those of popes Pius IV. and Pius V., who occupied the 
papal chair from 1555 to 1572. The deliciousness of the fruit 
soon procured for the tree a wide propagation around the coasts 
of the Mediterranean and deep into Western Asia, and not only 
do the Italians say portugallo, but the modern Greeks say por- 
toghalea, the Albanians protokale, and even the Kurds portoghal ; 
while in the north the Russians, though neighbours of the Chinese, 
have adopted the German name appelsin — all signs of a com- 
plete revolution in the world's traffic, which no longer passed 
through Asia from East to West, as in the time of Hellenism and 



ORANGE. 339 



the Roman emperors, and afterwards of the Islamite Arabs, but 
from the time of Vasco de Gama had taken the opposite direction, 
and made the ocean its highway. Portuguese and Spaniards 
introduced the tree into America, where it throve wonderfully in 
the tropical regions of that new world. Another and late variety, 
the so-called Mandarines ( Citrus madurensts), smaller, sweeter, and 
more aromatic than the orange, appeared in the nineteenth century, 
and occupies more ground every year. It is said to have come to 
Sicily from Malta. — Altogether, the orange group is very sus- 
ceptible of change ; situation, grafting, and mode of treatment 
have already produced innumerable varieties. It was once the 
gardener's pride to produce such varieties at the time when, from 
the Tuileries and afterwards from Versailles, together with the 
opera, gilding, and porcelain, large orangeries of round trees in 
splendid tubs and vases, forming long avenues, were a costly but 
indispensable part of every court or nobleman's house. Later on, 
with rising culture, these orangeries changed into more botanical 
conservatories, and, as aesthetic Humanism progressed, young 
enthusiasts began to turn their backs on the court gardens, with 
their spirals and voluted cornices, and rush to the land of blue 
skies, golden fruit, and pure Doric architecture. But they had to 
travel far before they trod a Hesperian grove, and even there the 
poetic tree and fruit were subjected to the aims of production and 
profit ; the blossoms were ruthlessly shaken down to make Cologne 
water of; the lemons were squeezed and the flowing juice poured 
into wooden tubs ; the ripe fruit was sugared by confectioners for 
the markets of the world, and from the rinds distillers manu- 
factured Bergamot oil. — When Paestum built its famous temples, 
when the Tauromenians sat in their theatre, when Pindar, ^Eschylus, 
and Plato were the guests of the kings of Syracuse, there was not 
a blossoming lemon-tree to be seen far and wide ; nay, those 
ancient heroes, poets, and sages had never so much as heard of 
one. The villas in which the Humanists of the fifteenth century 
and the members of the Platonic Academy strolled were the first 
to be adorned with orange trees, and sweet oranges were first 
plucked from the evergreen boughs by the Jesuit fathers, and 
handed to smiling dames in hoops and powder, for the refreshment 
of their beautiful rouged and thirsty lips (note 79). 



THE C A ROB-TREE. 

(CERATONIA SILIQUA.) 

The Carob-tree is an evergreen, not very tall, but wide-spreading 
and shady ; it loves best to grasp with its roots the hot, sun-warmed 
precipices in the neighbourhood of the sea, that shelter it from 
cold north winds. It grows slowly, does not bear fruit till after its 
twentieth year, and lives for centuries. Its fruit — flat brown pods 
an inch broad, six or even twelve inches long, curved like a horn 
or sickle, and filled with dark, glossy, bean-like seeds and sweet 
nourishing pulp — are eaten by men and animals, and form a 
considerable article of trade. Until these pods are quite ripe and 
brown, they are considered unwholesome or even poisonous, but 
afterwards they are eaten by swine, horses, and asses, and even the 
swineherd and donkey-driver will not despise them when baked or 
roasted. If the tree be intended not merely to afford shade, but 
also to bear a rich crop of fruit, it is necessary to prune it from 
time to time, like the olive and the vine. Its northern limit is 
about that of the lemons and oranges. The carob is widely 
diffused in the East, and no market till far into Russia is without 
this cheap dainty ; it is largely found in North Italy, costs little, 
and is a special favourite with boys. The tree did not grow in 
ancient Greece, but the sweet pods were brought to the Greek 
markets from the East ; they were incorrectly called Egyptian figs, 
for Theophrastus expressly declares that "the ker onion did not 
grow in Egypt at all, but in Syria and Ionia, and about Cnidos 
and Rhodes." It was therefore a plant of Syria and Ionia, which 
had spread as far as Cnidos in the south-west of Asia Minor, and 
to Rhodes. Theophrastus describes the tree correctly enough, 



CAROBS. 341 



but he does describe it, and that minutely, proving that his readers 
were unacquainted with the tree and had no opportunity of 
observing it. Strabo also knew nothing of the tree in Egypt, but 
is aware of its existence in Ethiopia, or the country where Meroe 
was situated. Theophrastus pointed out the evil effect of the 
blossoms, and he might have added of the unripe pods. Galen 
extends the hurtful quality even to the ripe fruit, and thinks it 
would have been better if the tree had never been brought to 
Europe from the East. The true fatherland of the tree was fertile 
Canaan ; and as it must be grafted before it will produce edible 
fruit, it was, like the olive and date-palm, a product of human and 
especially of Semitic art and industry. Anciently, as now, the 
sweet carob-pods were a common article of food in Palestine. 
John the Baptist in the wilderness had eked out his life with them, 
and modern travellers have been shown the very tree that furnished 
the forerunner of the Messiah with " St. John's bread." In the 
parable (Luke xv.) the Prodigal Son, who had sunk so low as to 
herd swine, would fain have filled his belly with the keratia 
hornlets, i.e. t carob-pods) " that the swine did eat, and no man gave 
unto him." Carat, the name of the small weight for gold and 
diamonds, which is taken from the beans of the keratia (called by 
Isidore cerates, adopted later by the Arabs, and communicated by 
them to other languages, also called siliqua) shows how widely 
spread and how common the fruit must have been in the Greek 
Orient. In the Roman authors we find a few passages that hint 
at attempts made even then to plant the Carob in the West. 
According to Columella the swine in the forests fed on Grcecce 
siliquce, besides other wild fruits. But as it is impossible that 
carob-trees grew wild in Europe in Columella's time, the state- 
ment may have been copied from some Greek-Oriental writer on 
agriculture. In another passage Columella advises that the tree 
should be sown in autumn, probably another adopted foreign 
maxim ; Pliny repeats it, but he calls the fruit prcedulces siliquce or 
siliqucz Syriacce, and does not treat it as a native production. A 
generation earlier, Scribonius Largus also called the pods Syriacce. 
Where siliquce. are elsewhere mentioned as forming the food of the 
poor and contented, there is no reason to suppose that anything 



342 THE CAROB-TREE. 

was meant but beans or peas. Towards the end of the second 
century Galen, as we have seen, only mentions the carob fruit as 
an import from the East. But in the last days of the Roman 
Empire, Palladius gives full instructions about propagating the tree, 
and speaks of his own experience in it There is some doubt 
whether the passage be not a later insertion ; but even if the 
naturalization of the tree began in Roman times, the Arabic 
names — Italian carrobo, carruba, Spanish garrobo, algarrobo, 
Portuguese alfarroba, French caronbe, carouge — teach us that it 
was the Arabs who either revived the culture when extinct, or, if 
they found it still existing, gave it its present extension. In the 
southern half of the Italian peninsula, carob-trees are now more 
common, and the harvest richer, than those travellers would 
suppose who follow the common route, and perhaps have only 
seen the Syrian tree on the rocky highway near Amalfi. Sicily, 
that Arabic island, produces and ships a great quantity of carob- 
fruit; the Ceratonicz are also not wanting in Sardinia, where they 
are often planted singly in the fields to afford shelter for the 
midday siesta j but the finest trees of the kind grow on Apulian 
Gargano, that seldom- visited, grand, isolated limestone promontory, 
so remarkable both from a picturesque and from a scientific (in- 
cluding botanical) point of view. In modern Greece, carob-trees 
are found scattered here and there on the mainland and in the 
islands, some being of venerable age, like that under which Fiedler 
stopped to dine on the Skironian road, and whose trunk measured 
several feet in diameter. In Asia Minor, Syria, etc., the tree is an 
object of religious veneration, to the Mussulman as well as the 
Christian. It is dedicated to St. George, and it is not uncommon 
to find chapels built among its boughs. As in all cultivated plants, 
varieties have been introduced in the carob-tree, which differ in 
the comparative sweetness and capacity of keeping, as well as the 
shape and size of their pods. In the East, where the fruit possibly 
developed more sugar — and sometimes also in Europe — they 
squeeze out of the pods a kind of honey to boil other fruits in, the 
refuse being thrown to the pigs. The hard wood is also prized, 
and the bark is used for tanning. 



THE RABBIT. 

(lepus cuniculus.) 

The Romans acquired from Spain their knowledge of a domestic 
animal resembling the hare, which the Greeks in the east of the 
Mediterranean had never seen \ this animal was the Rabbit. Like 
Stipa tenacissima and the cork-oak, it was peculiar to Spain, and 
closely connected with the Iberian race, with whom it seems to 
have come to Western Europe by way of Africa. The Romans 
called it cuniculus, a word possibly rooted in the Iberian language, 
and only provided with a Latin ending (note 80). As far back 
as Cicero and Caesar, the same word also meant subterranean 
passages, and it was a matter of dispute whether these were called 
after the animal, or the animal after them. The ancients generally 
adopted the latter opinion, for no other reason than that they 
more often met with the thing and word in that sense than with 
the little-known animal; while we think the first opinion more 
natural, though the Roman sappers and miners may not exactly 
have learnt their art from the rabbit, as Martial supposes ; 

"Monstravit tacitas hostibus ille vz'as." 

In literature we find the rabbit first mentioned by Polybius, about 
the middle of the second century B.C., in the form kyniklos taken 
from the Latin, which Athenaeus spells kouniklos. The word is also 
found in Posidonius of Apamea, an historian and philosopher of the 
beginning of the first century B.C. Catullus knows Spain as a 
country rich in rabbits or rabbit-holes — Tu cuniculosce Celtibertcs 
fili Egnati. Varro, Strabo, and Pliny discourse more at length on 
the animal, its adoption and propagation, and the method of 
catching it. The Iberians must have been specially devoted to 



344 



THE RABBIT. 



breeding rabbits and eating their flesh; they had brought the 
animal with them across the sea to the Spanish-Italian islands, not 
only to Corsica, where Polybius found them, but also to the 
Baleares. They regarded as the greatest dainties the unborn 
foetus, or the new-born suckling, which were devoured intestines 
and all ; these unborn or new-born rabbits were called laurices, 
probably another Iberian word. But the excessive fecundity of 
the hare species — a rabbit will produce from four to twelve young 
ones six or seven times a year, and begins the business a few 
months after birth — soon rendered the animal a plague both on 
the Spanish continent and in the islands ; it mined the cultivated 
land with its burrows, it gnawed the roots and young shoots, it 
undermined trees and even human dwellings. Strabo tells 
us that the inhabitants of the Gymnesiae (Majorca and Minorca) 
once sent an embassy to the Romans, begging that they would 
assign them another land to dwell in, as they could no longer hold 
their own against the multitude of rabbits. Pliny reports it as 
certain that they petitioned the Emperor Augustus for military help, 
as they could not manage the animals alone. And this trouble 
was not only felt throughout Spain, but extended to Massilia — 
perhaps another sign of the ethnographical position of the 
Ligurians, who, before the arrival of the Celts from the north, had 
occupied the whole coast on which Marseilles is situated. Mean- 
while the Iberians recognised in another half- wild and half-domesti- 
cated animal, which they had procured from Africa, a sturdy enemy 
of the rabbit, and a very zealous companion in the chase. This was 
the Ferret, a kind of fitchet or foulmart — Latin viverra, Span. 
huron, Ital. furetto, French furet. It crept into the rabbit-hole, 
and drove the inhabitants out at its mouth, where the hunter in- 
tercepted and killed them. The Greeks called this ferret by the 
general name for all of the weasel kind, gale, to which they added 
for distinction the adjective Tartessia. Herodotus is already cog- 
nisant of such Tartessian, ue. s Spanish weasels ; in describing the 
north coast of Africa, he says that there, under the Silphium-bushes, 
lived galeai exactly similar to the Tartessian, which last were 
therefore used in Spain for hunting 500 years before Christ. We 
learn from Varro that rabbits were kept by the Romans in so-called 



THE RABBIT. 345 



leporaria (warrens) at the time of the Republic ; one of the 
speakers at Athenasus's Banquet, during a voyage from Dicae- 
archia (now Pozzuoli) to Naples, had found the small island at the 
extreme point of land (Nisida) inhabited by few men and many 
rabbits — which is even now true of the Italian islands in com- 
parison with the mainland. But the animal was always considered 
by the Romans the characteristic sign of Spain ; we see this, for 
example, in the gold and silver coins of the Emperor Hadrian, 
where, on the reverse with the legend Hispania, there is seen a 
rabbit in front of a reclining female figure holding a branch of 
olive and resting its left arm on the rock Calpe. 

Now-a-days the pretty, and so peculiar, little animal is spread 
over a great part of Europe, and is a favourite and common article 
of food, especially in France and Belgium, under the name of 
lapin. This must have already been the case at the period 
described by Gregory of Tours, for he reports of Roccolenus, that 
he frequently ate laurices at Quadragesima. Petrus Crescentius, a 
contemporary of Dante, says that rabbits lived in a continuous tract 
extending from Spain through Provence to Lombardy — therefore 
always on primitive Iberian ground. It is now well known, not only 
to the people of Provence, but to the Parisians ; it has not only 
overrun the islands of the Western Mediterranean, but the Greek 
islands. In France, England, and the Netherlands it has been 
considerably changed and improved by domestication and cross- 
breeding, not only in delicacy of flesh, size, fecundity, and endur- 
ance of a cold climate, but also as regards the silky softness of 
its fur (note 81). 



THE CAT. 

The dog is a very ancient companion of man; certainly the earliest 
of all animals that man associated with himself. Who, that did 
not know the fact, would believe that that comical enemy of the 
dog, the Cat, now hardly absent from any house inhabited by 
civilized or uncivilized people, is quite a modern acquisition ? We 
must except the inhabitants of the Nile Valley. The reports of 
ancient writers, and the monuments and remains of ancient Egypt, 
equally prove that the Egyptians, that mysterious people, alike 
attractive and repulsive, whose doings go back into the night of 
Time, reared multitudes of cats, held them sacred, and embalmed 
them after death. Diodorus relates an occurrence of which he 
was an eye-witness, and which, he adds, proves the deep religious 
reverence that the Egyptians entertained for the animal. It was 
the time when the supremacy of Rome was greatly feared, and 
everything was done to please such Romans as were then in Egypt, 
and to avoid all quarrels with them. It happened that a Roman 
involuntarily killed a cat ; the populace rose in anger, and attacked 
the house in which the deed had been perpetrated ; no efforts of 
King Ptolemy and his officers, no dread of Rome and the Romans, 
could save the criminal's life. The species of cat tamed by the 
Egyptians was the felis maniculata. The mute reserve and there- 
fore mysteriousness which Hegel says is common to all animals, is 
especially observable in the cat and its peculiar secret ways. It 
has still, for those who leave it to its own devices and attentively 
observe it, something Egyptian, which inspires some people with 
fondness and others with dislike. To tame this animal so com- 
pletely and accustom it to mankind — for the domestic cat never 
runs wild again, and always returns to the house — was only possible 



CAT. WEASEL. 347 



to the Egyptians, and was the work of centuries. Only after 
many, very many generations of cats had been treated in the same 
kind, careful, and tender manner, so that during the long period 
every experience of pain or hurt had been extinguished from the 
memory of that shy creature, was it possible that our present 
snuggling house-cat could be produced out of the wild animal, 
w hich seems the least adapted of all for the process of taming. 
Here, as in so many cases, religious superstition worked wonders, 
and for once was serviceable, instead of detrimental, to culture. 
F. Lenormant asserts that the cat has been represented in Egyptian 
works since the 12th dynasty: if this be correct, the merit of the 
first taming would belong to the inhabitants of the Upper Nile 
countries, and Egypt could have only continued the work there 
commenced. It is fortunate that the diffusion of the Egyptian 
cat to other countries took place at the time of the Roman Empire, 
before Christian asceticism had reached its lowest depth, and 
before the Islamite invasion ; else this domestic animal might have 
disappeared with the destruction of all ancient Egypt and its 
religious ideas and customs, and the loss would perhaps never 
again have been made good. Indeed, many an animal which once 
served mankind has suffered such a fate ; above all, the African 
elephant, which carried Hannibal's soldiers, crossed the Alps 
through snow and ice, and is now only found in the wildernesses 
of the interior of Africa, where it is being slowly exterminated by 
reckless and cruel hunters. 

The Greeks and Romans not seldom suffered from the plague 
of an abnormal multiplication of mice, and now and then we hear 
of some miraculous deliverance of a district from the mice which 
overran it, or of a wholesale emigration in consequence of the 
impossibility of protection from those rodents. 

The pre-European language already knew the Mouse as a 
domestic thief, for its name, which is found alike in Greece and 
Italy, on the Elbe as on the Indus, is known to be derived from a 
verb which means to steal. As enemies of the mouse — and it has 
many — all the animals that stealthily prowled round the houses of 
men — the weasel and its sub-varieties (note 82), the foulmart, 
marten, and wild cat, must have been very early noticed \ some of 



348 THE CAT. 



these animals were on that, account cherished and taken into a 
kind of partnership with man ; weasels and martens can be tamed, 
and before the introduction of the cat they were tamed much more 
frequently than now. On the other hand, poultry, and especially 
their young, suffered at the hand of these robbers, so that their 
increase was checked again. In Greek these animals were called 
galee, ktis, iktis, ailouros ; in Latin mustela, felts, melts. The 
animals were not strictly distinguished, and their names also 
fluctuate both in popular language and in literature. But there is 
no passage containing one of these names, which we are obliged 
to interpret of the tame domestic cat. The weasel in particular, 
galee, is named, together with the mouse, as its superior enemy and 
great object of fear, just as we associate the cat and mouse in 
fables, games, and figures of speech. 

" Two beings," says the Mouse to the Frog, in the beginning of 
the Batrachomyomachia, " I fear above all things on earth, the 
Hawk (kirkos), and the Weasel {galee), which have done my species 
much harm; yes, and that painful, fatal, deceitful Trap; but most 
of all the Weasel, which is the strongest, and even comes creeping 
after me into my holes." In "The Wasps" of Aristophanes one 
replies to another who asks for a domestic story, " Oh, anything to 
oblige ; well then : Once upon a time there was a mouse and a 
weasel" — just as we say to children, "There was once a cat and a 
mouse." In one of Plautus's plays a weasel has caught a mouse 
at the very feet of a speaker. The Egyptian domestic cat is called 
by the Greek describers ailouros; when the word, which is not 
often met with, refers to a Greek animal, there is nothing to prevent 
our supposing it to mean the marten or the wild cat. In a passage 
by Callimachus, who wrote it at Alexandria, we might naturally 
think the Egyptian cat was meant : a man in dog-hunger devours 
the cow, the horse, and the ailouros, " the terror of small beasts." 
But the description is even more characteristic of the house-marten 
than of the equally rapacious, but softer and more gentle, domestic 
cat, for which the poet would surely have found a more appropriate 
epithet. The same thing applies to a verse in the fifteenth idyll of 
Theocritus, the scene being also laid in Alexandria. Here the 
impatient mistress scolds a lazy maid in the words, " What, again 



WEASEL. MARTEN. W1T.D CAT. 349 

these weasels wanting to sleep soft?" The poet might indeed 
have been thinking of Egyptian house-cats, but tame martens and 
weasels would not have disdained a soft bed either. In a frag- 
ment by the Comic poet Anaxandrides, the speaker sneers at an 
Egyptian on account of the Egyptian customs, which he, imitating 
Herodotus, describes as diametrically opposed to the Greek : "If 
you see a cat in pain, you weep ; I should like best to kill it and 
skin it " — where the Greek may have had in his mind the Greek 
(wild) animal, which answered to the cat in Egypt. The Latin 
mustela is exactly our weasel ; but even felts is nowhere the tame 
cat, but either the foulmart and marten, or the wild cat. The 
agricultural authors Varro and Columella give instructions for con- 
triving duck-houses and hare-parks, so that no feles or meles may 
enter; they cannot possibly have meant domestic cats. The 
manner in which Horace relates the well-known fable of the Town 
and Country Mouse, at once shows that in his time no cats were 
yet kept in the houses of the capital : " A city mouse paid a visit 
to the field mouse, and was entertained by him to the best of his 
ability with peas, oats, wild berries, and pieces of bacon. But the 
spoilt guest despised the common fare, and said, 'What's the good 
of living all alone here in the fields and woods, far from men ? Come 
with me to the city, there you will find better food.' They set off; 
it was late at night, they crept through a hole in the wall and into 
the urban house. There stood the dishes and baskets left from 
the banquet over-night ; they feasted well and slept on a crimson 
carpet. Suddenly " — they see the cat come creeping ? and have 
barely time to save themselves ? — no such thing — " the doors 
opened noisily, a loud barking shook the house, the two mice ran 
hither and thither and were almost frightened to death. Then the 
field mouse said, ' Thank you, I would rather not have your 
luxurious life ; my hole in the earth, where I lie safe and undis- 
turbed, pleases me better, though there be nothing to gnaw but 
peas.' " In such a fable, instead of the servants coming in early in 
the morning to clean the banqueting-hall, a modern story-teller 
would certainly have given the cat her part, and would have said 
nothing about barking dogs. Pliny seems to have some acquaint- 
ance with the peculiarities of the cat, feh's, but even he does not 



35o THE CAT. 



describe it as the tame companion of man ; and what he does say 
would equally fit the European wild cat. A Pompeian mosaic, 
now in the National Museum at Naples, represents " a cat mangling 
a quail ; " but the striped lynx-like fur, as well as the expression of 
the head, are far more like those of the wild cat, although a similar 
form may now and then be found among our present domestic 
cats. In the excavations at Pompeii no remains of a cat have ever 
turned up. Horses, dogs, goats, and other domestic animals were 
buried, and their remains have been discovered, but " very remark- 
ably all the cats had disappeared in time." The wonder ceases, if 
at that time there were no cats in the town. The little animals 
seen on early coins of Tarentum and Rhegium, which some have 
taken for cats, are so small and indistinct, that they might be 
explained in any other way — as any one will allow who has ever 
had such a coin in his hand. 

If we search the literature of Fable, it unfortunately gives us no 
sure chronological data. In the popular ancient fables of iEsop, as 
far as they are preserved in fragments and hints by authors of the 
classic period, the cat is nowhere found. In two fables of Babrios, 
whose date is doubtful, the ailouros appears, but each time it is 
distinctly the marten trying to entrap fowls ; in one he hangs on a 
peg in the shape of a pouch (of marten-skin), but the cock knows 
him by the teeth remaining on : in the other the hen is sick, and 
the ailouros creeps up to her to sympathize, upon which the hen 
says, "You be off! that is the best way to keep me from dying." 
Babrios also looks upon the weasel as the enemy of the mouse : 
in fable 32 the weasel is transformed into a beautiful woman, and 
betrays itself during the wedding by pursuing a mouse ; and in 
fable 31, the weasels and the mice go to war. In the fables of 
Phaedrus the same thing is seen. In fables 4 and 6, the mice and 
the weasels go to war, and a weasel caught by a man cries out, 
" Spare me, for I clear your house of troublesome mice." But in 
Palladius, when the days of the Western Empire were already 
numbered, we recognise our tame cat under a name used for this 
new domestic animal alone, catus, which, like the Egyptian animal 
itself, has since spread from Italy to all peoples, not only those 
of Europe, Basques, Finns, Albanians, and modern Greeks, but also 



CAT. RAT. 35] 



in the far East to Asiatics of the most different race (note 83). 
After Palladius we find the word again in the ecclesiastical historian 
Evagrius Scholasticus, who wrote in Greek : " ailouros, commonly 
called katta" He lived at Epiphania in Coelesyria, and wrote till 
the year 594; so the expression katta was already a common one 
in Western Asia towards the year 600. About the same time 
Isidore in the extreme West says in Latin : " him (the mouser) 
the vulgar call catus because he catches." The word is also found 
elsewhere in those times, and becomes more frequent with every 
generation. It was a popular appellation formed in Italy, meaning 
really the little animal, the young, just as auca (little bird) was 
said for goose, la pecora for sheep, etc. At least this is the most 
probable derivation. 

Was there any particular circumstance just then, that caused 
an Egyptian animal, which the Greeks and Romans had never 
thought of before, to become more frequent in houses than 
formerly? History is silent; but the following conjecture presses 
itself upon us. At the time of the Migration of Nations, the 
dwellings, granaries, and cellars of the European world were over- 
run by a hitherto unknown voracious rodent coming from Asia, 
the Rat, mus rattus. Tradition does not tell us the moment of 
its appearance nor the direction it took, but the name rat is already 
to be found in early Old High German glossaries, as well as in 
the Anglo-Saxon one of ^lfric in England ; it is therefore con- 
siderably older than Albertus Magnus, in whose writings the 
animal was first described by natural historians. Did the rat 
come into Europe in the wake of the immigrant nations ? Was 
it disturbed in the heart of Asia by the setting-out of Turkish 
nations, say, the Huns ? When it reached the east of Europe, the 
Slavs must have been already divided into sections, for they call it 
by different names ; the Pole uses szczur, the Russian krysa, and 
the Danubian Slavs another word again. The German name 
ratte, ratz, Old High German rato, has no doubt lost an h and is 
identical with the Old Slavic krutu, Russ. krot, the mole, Lith. 
kertus, the shrew-mouse. In Old Irish the rat was called Frankish 
mouse ; it had therefore reached Ireland from the land of the 
Franks. Europe has experienced a second and still more terrible 



j52 THE CAT. 



invasion of the kind since the first thirty years of the eighteenth 
century ; then the great travelling rat, mus decm?ianus, appeared on 
the Lower Volga, overran in curious starts and pauses one town 
and district after another, spread itself by means of river-boats and 
ocean-ships — for it delights in voyages — with the magazines of 
the Austrian and Russian armies, and during the revolutionary 
wars all over Germany and the west of Europe; and has long 
since not only taken possession of Paris and London (perhaps by 
ship direct from the East Indies), but has followed commerce across 
the Atlantic to the New World, everywhere exterminating its weaker 
predecessor, the house rat of the Middle Ages. In a similar 
manner must the pretty little nibbling house mouse have come to 
us from Southern Asia — was its arrival contemporaneous, say, with 
the immigration of the Indo-Europeans? Other animals that 
were unknown to antiquity seem to have made their appearance 
among the civilized nations of the West at the time of the Teutonic 
Migration, or with the introduction of culture and roads into the 
dark East of Europe ; for example, the Badger and the Hamster. 
The German name of the first, docks, has spread all over the 
Romance countries, to which the animal seems to have been a 
stranger before; the German name of the second, unknown in 
Italy, taken over bodily by the French, le hamster, and copied by 
the Germans from a Slavic word, argues an inhabitant of the earth 
that came from the East, and for which a path was prepared by 
the agriculture that thinned the woods (note 84). 

The cat reached the Germans at a time when the myth-pro- 
ducing power, though enfeebled, was not wholly extinct (note 85). 
The cat became the favourite animal of Freya, the Goddess of 
Love, perhaps supplanting the weasel. Grimm says : " Freya's 
car was drawn by two cats. The cat and weasel were considered 
wise animals, skilled in magic, whom men had good reason for 
humouring." In the later Middle Ages, witches change into 
cats : to which superstition the creature's stealthy night-walking 
ways, her dark fur, and her eyes gleaming ghost-like in the gloom, 
might give occasion, even without any reminiscences of heathenism. 
One story may serve for all others of the kind. " On the last day 
of April a miller's boy was busy in the mill very late in the even- 



THE CAT 353 



ing, when a black cat entered ; the boy gave it a blow on its fore- 
foot, so that it ran away howling. The next day, when the youth 
went to the miller's house, he noticed that his wife lay in bed with 
a crushed arm, and learned that it had been hurt the evening be- 
fore, no one knew how. So he guessed that the miller's wife was 
a witch, and that she must have been to the Blocksberg in the 
shape of a cat on the evening in question." That noble ladies and 
princesses of the eleventh century already held favourite cats in 
their lap, and fed them with dainties, is shown by the example of 
the wife of Emperor Constantine Monomachus. Even now the 
animal is a greater favourite with the Easterns, and in the south 
and east of Europe, than with nations of German origin. In 
Russia there is not a shop on the threshold of which a well- 
nourished cat does not lie blinking half in sleep. In France the 
cat is the friend of the household, and in Italy there is a universal 
partiality for this fine, clean, and graceful creature. " In many a 
church from Venice to Rome," says Fridolin Hoffmann, " I saw 
a well-fed sacristy cat sitting on the balustrades of side-altars, or 
even on the communion bench ; the service did not disturb the 
creature's equanimity. It quietly walked along the front of the 
pews amid the pealing of the organ, and the people were polite 
enough to lift up their prayer-books to let it pass unhindered. 
Being thus privileged, it is no wonder that even in very decent 
restaurants you suddenly find two or three cats sitting near 
you on the cushioned seat or the next chair, comfortably pur- 
ring or magnetically rubbing their sides with their noses." An 
example of the peculiar manner in which individuals are some- 
times attracted by this animal is afforded by a day-labourer at 
Berne, one Gottfried Mind, the Raphael of Cats. Both as a boy 
and as a man he was indifferent to everything, and almost idiotic, 
but he observed the life and manners of the cat with intelligence 
and love, and depicted them in a masterly manner in water-colours 
(he died in 1814). 



23 



THE BUFFALO. 

It was also in consequence of the Migration of Nations that the 
Bos family — that first friend of man when emerging out of bar- 
barism — was enriched by the addition of a kinsman from the 
South, endowed with tremendous pulling power, the black and 
scowling Buffalo. He now lives in the moist, hot malaria plains 
of Italy, enjoying their slime, and defying their venomous vapours ; 
the maremmas of Tuscany, the bottom-lands about the Tiber's 
mouth, the Pontine marshes, the swamps of Paestum, the Basili- 
cata ; also in the landes of Gascony, in many parts of Hungary, 
etc. The Pontine buffaloes wallow like immense swine in the 
high reeds of the swamps, standing still at the sound of a carriage 
on the high road, and stupidly staring at the traveller ; or, when 
teased by gad-flies, hiding up to the muzzle in the water. The 
buffalo is employed, like the ox, in dragging the heavy plough, or 
the loaded harvest waggon ; its milk is made into highly valued 
cheese (called in Naples muzzarello)^ and, after death, its thick, 
heavy skin forms the strongest leather. Niebuhr found the 
animal widely diffused in the East. In his description of Arabia, 
1772, he writes : " In the East buffaloes are found in almost every 
marshy district and near large rivers in greater numbers than 
common cattle. The buffalo-cow gives more milk, and the 
buffalo-ox is quite as well adapted for labour as the common ox. 
I have seen buffaloes in Egypt, on the Isle of Bombay, near 
Surat, on the Euphrates, Tigris, and Orontes, at Scanderoon, and 
elsewhere. I do not remember to have seen any in Arabia, and 
indeed there is not sufficient water for the animal in that country. 
The flesh of the buffalo does not seem to me so good as other 
beef; it is coarse and hard." While progressive culture has 
almost exterminated those savage, obstinate, and kingly inhabi- 



THE BUFFALO. 355 



tants of the European forests, the ure-ox and the bison, the buf- 
falo was brought by immigrating nations from the borders of 
India to the southern coasts of Italy. Aristotle describes a wild 
ox living in Arachosia, near modern Kabool, which can be no 
other than our present buffalo. During the succeeding centuries 
that animal must have migrated farther west. It was first seen in 
Italy about the year 600 a.d., in the reign of the Longobardian 
king, Agilulf — Paul. Diac. 4, 11: " Then for the first time wild 
horses and buffaloes were brought to Italy, and regarded as won- 
ders by the Italian people " (note &6). We must be grateful to 
the Longobardian monk for this report, for how seldom do the 
historians, who have enough to do with questions of war and 
government, throw us a crumb of what relates to culture ; but we 
should have liked something still more exact. Were these bubali, 
we ask, the uri and bisontes of the European forests ? That can 
hardly be, for those animals must have been often seen in Italy, 
and therefore would not have excited the astonishment of the 
Romans or Longobardians. But if the bubali were real buffaloes, 
whence and along what route had those inhabitants of a warmer 
region reached cold and distant Europe ? They could not have 
been brought by sea. It seems probable, as they appear in com- 
pany with wild horses, that they were a present to the Longobar- 
dian kings from the Khan of the Avars, for this Turkish race of 
nomads, who at that time dwelt near the Danube and scourged 
the Roman Empire with fearful devastations, were on friendly 
terms with the Longobardian Court. If King Agilulf sent ship- 
builders to the Avarian Khan to supply the vessels necessary for 
taking an island in Thrace, that Khan may well have sent pro- 
ducts from the heart of Asia in return. So the black, naked, 
heavy-footed buffaloes, which are kept in order in such a charac- 
teristically Asiatic manner by men on horseback, armed with long 
spears, are living witnesses of the terrible times when the immea- 
surable mass of land in the East, with which the peninsula we 
call Europe lies conterminous, without any means of defence 
but distance, kept disgorging savage hordes, bent, wherever it was 
possible, on tearing up by the roots all that was human, the acqui- 
sitions of long-continued and ennobling culture. 



356 THE BUFFALO. 



That the wholly or partially Nomadic races, which by turns 
encamped in and drove each other out of beautiful, fruitful, and 
once highly-cultivated Pannonia, should bring new races of cattle 
with them, and perhaps better ones than those inherited by 
antiquity from the primitive world, lay in the nature of things ; 
and also that such cattle should find their way into Italy, and 
there maintain their breed when the wave of invaders that intro- 
duced them had long passed away. The three races of the 
South Russian steppes, a classic cattle region, are the deposit 
left by as many Nomadic invasions. The so-called Ukraine, or 
Podolian, or Hungarian ox, large and greyish-white, long-legged 
and long-horned, fat and fleshy, the draught-animal of the 
waggons and vans that traverse the steppe for hundreds of versts, 
is akin to the large whitish oxen, with long horns wide apart, that 
are found in Italy south of the • Po, and have also passed over 
into Spain and Algiers. As Varro already remarked that white 
oxen were rare in Italy, but the rule in Thrace, these may have 
been the Scythian cattle brought by the Iranian pastoral tribes, 
and afterwards introduced into Italy by Goths or Longobards. 
And the Euboean breed, which was also white (" whence our 
poets say, white-cowed Eubcea" — iElian), would probably have 
the same origin ; for Eubcea was very early connected with 
Thrace and the North. The Scythian cattle, however, are said 
by Herodotus to be kolon, stumpy-horned, and by Hippocrates 
kereos ater^ hornless, therefore resembling the small German 
cattle which, Tacitus says, " lacked the glory of the brow." Per- 
haps the second South Russian species, smaller and red, the true 
steppe-cattle, are descendants of that Old Scythian breed ; while 
the third species, the so-called Kalmuck cattle, came to the West, 
as the name indicates, only with the Tartar, or even the Mongol 
hordes. In Italy, Varro mentions the Gallic breed (had it come 
in with the Gauls ?) as peculiarly adapted to field-work ; while 
Pliny says the small, insignificant-looking Alpine cattle gave the 
most milk ; and Columella says the same thing of the Altinian 
cows in Venetia. At the time of Theodoric the Ostrogoth, the 
Tyrolese cattle were small, but powerful ; for when the Alemanni, 
shattered by Chlodwig, king of the Franks, seek shelter on Gothic 



OXEN. 357 



ground, and are some of them to be settled in Italy, their cattle 
are knocked up by the long and hurried march, and can go no 
farther; the king then orders the provincials of Noricum to 
barter their own small animals for the large Alemannian cattle ; 
which proves an accammodation to both parties : " Ut illi acqui- 
rant viribus robustos, vos forma conspicuos." The big Aleman- 
nian breed may have come from the Gallic-Roman settlers within 
the limes, whose towns and farms had been first sacked and after- 
wards occupied by the Alemanni. The hornless cattle have now 
entirely disappeared in Germany under the influence of culture, 
but are still to be met with in Scandinavia, whence, during the 
Middle Ages, they spread to the White Sea. The oldest Euro- 
pean cattle may still have existed during the Roman age in the 
Ligurian species, which was considered weak and miserable, and 
the remains of which are perhaps revealed to us in the bones 
found under lake-habitations. About the different races of cattle, 
their distribution and arrival in Europe, there is much left to 
explore, and perhaps to discover. There is no doubt that our 
tame Ox is descended from the Ure ox of primitive times, but its 
domestication was scarcely accomplished in Europe. 



THE HOP. 

(humulus lupulus.) 

In the year 1766 the great Linnaeus asserted that the hop mi- 
grated into Europe from distant Russia at the time of the Migration 
of Nations. The fact that the hop now grows wild on hedges 
and in woods would in no wise invalidate that assertion, for a 
plant so widely-cultivated, supposing that the soil and climate 
were favourable, would easily run wild and find its way into 
places where it had never been planted by the hand of man. 
But we are certain of three things only : first, that the ancients 
had never heard of such a plant, the flowers of which are an 
agreeable addition to beer ; secondly, that accounts of the earliest 
Middle Ages, which often mention beer and the products of 
southern gardens, never say a word about hops, which afterwards 
became so indispensable ; and, thirdly, that in many European 
countries, like England and Sweden, the use of hops for making 
beer is first heard of towards the end of the Middle Ages, or even 
in the course of the sixteenth century, and then gradually becomes 
more common. 

In the Lex Salica and the decrees of Charlemagne we search 
in vain for a hint of this plant and its cultivation ; neither is it 
mentioned towards the middle of the ninth century by Walafredus 
Strabo, a North German, in his " Hortulus." But about that time 
we find traces of the hop in other regions. In a deed of gift of 
King Pipin the father of Charlemagne to the Abbey of St. Denys, 
dated the seventeenth year of his reign, the king bestows on that 
monastery Humlonarias cum integritate, in which we may find a 
resemblance to hum/o, Mid. Latin for hop ; but here it occurs 



THE HOP. 359 



amongst other proper names, as that of a place or estate, and the 
similarity of sound may be purely accidental. But the polyptych 
of Irmino, Abbot of St. Germain-des-Pres, composed in the first 
years of the ninth century, before the death of Charlemagne, 
often mentions the payment of hop-dues, the plant being called 
humolo, humelo, umlo, and twice fumlo. Only a few years later, 
a statute of the Abbot Adalhardus of Corvey, in 822, absolves 
the millers from all work connected with malt and hops, and from 
the obligation to furnish the latter material. In the monastic 
documents of Freisingen, of the time of Louis the German, 
towards the middle and end of the ninth century, we find 
humularia, or hop-gardens, frequently mentioned, so that hops 
must already have been common in North Germany. During 
the succeeding centuries the cultivation of hops must have become 
still more general in that country, and the later the period the 
more frequent is the mention of hop-dues and hop-fields. The 
plant was so largely cultivated in the time of Albertus Magnus 
that it gave rise to express decrees, and hop-dues were afterwards 
quite general in districts with a Slav population, like Silesia, 
Brandenburg, and Mecklenburg. The first mention of hops 
being cultivated in Silesia is in 1224. In consequence of being 
mixed with this bitter plant, beer could be kept longer and 
transported farther, and gradually became an object of active 
trade. Flanders and North Germany had towns that grew rich 
and renowned because of their hop-beer. Of those in Flanders, 
Ghent was the most famous ; and two of its brewer-citizens, 
the Arteveldts, father and son, could treat on equal terms with 
kings. In Germany, Eimbeck was celebrated, and its fame is 
still preserved in the Bavarian " Bock-beer," a corruption of 
Eimbeck-beer. Schmeller tells of an amusing propagation of 
the blunder: "As a counterpart to the too-vigorous butting of 
this Bock (he-goat), there was brought out a milder Gaiss (she- 
goat), chiefly in the Jesuits' breweries." It was relatively long 
before hops reached the neighbouring countries. In England 
they were not known before the reigns of Henry VIII. and 
Edward VI. Other additions to beer had long been customary : 
oak-bark, leaves of trees, bitter roots, various wild herbs, and in 



360 THE HOP. 



Sweden milfoil, Achillea millefolium, or the plant there called 
pors, ledum palustre, or wild rosemary. We have already re- 
marked that the Paeonians in Thrace brewed beer with the 
addition of konyze; but what they meant by konyza is hard to 
say — at a later period the name is supposed to have meant the 
erigeroii viscosum, inula viscosa, or graveolens, etc. 

But was it really the great Migration that introduced this 
plant into Western Europe ? and where was it first used as an 
ingredient of beer? History refuses to answer, and we are 
obliged to have recourse to a comparison of the names in 
different languages. But this time they seem only to mock and 
bewilder us. Half-agreements, possible transitions, tempt us to 
form a combination ; their doubtfulness induces us to drop it 
again j if we decide upon one word as a point of departure, we 
can spin a thread from it with tolerable ease, but we could quite 
as well make the last link the first, and give the progress and 
development of the word a reverse direction. 

We are therefore inclined to place the simplest form of word 
at the head, which is the Low German and Low Countries word 
hoppe, hop. It is already found in the Glosses of Junius, which 
Graff assigns to the eighth or ninth century : " hoppe = timalus " 
(mis-copied for humalust); " feld-hoppe = bradigalo " (priadela 
was Dacian for briony). It is most unlikely that this hoppe itself 
came from the Mid. Latin hupa; the latter is only found in one 
authority, and that a Netherlands one; hupa, no doubt, is merely 
the German word Latinized. An etymology might be found in 
the verb hilpfen, hoppe?i, to hop, only it does not seem natural to 
describe a plant that climbs from bough to bough as a hopper or 
jumper. But whatever be its derivation, there arose a diminutive 
form out of this hoppe by the addition of an /, which explains the 
French houblon for houbelon, as well as the Mid. Latin hubalus. 
Farther on, in Italy, where the plant was neither cultivated nor 
used, the foreign word coalescing with the Article became lupolo, 
luppolo ; out of which popular name arose the later Mid. Latin 
lupuhis, used by Italian authors. The botany of the Middle Ages 
was so slavishly dependent on the Graeco-Roman literature, that 
a similar-sounding name of a plant was hunted for and happily 



THE HOP. 361 



found in Pliny, who says: "There are few wild plants in Italy 
that are used for food : there is one growing among willow-bushes, 
the lupus, but it is more a sweetmeat or a delicacy than food." 
There is not a word about its being a climbing plant, and if the 
name had not resembled the Mid. Latin lupulus, no one would 
have thought of its meaning the hop. By the easy conversion 
of a b or p into m, especially before a /, there was also developed 
from hupa, hubalus, hubelo, a Mid. Latin hutnlo, humulus ; and 
from the end of the eighth century this was the commonest and 
most widely diffused name for the hop, and accompanied the 
plant itself to the North and East. In Old Norse it became 
humall, in Finnic and Esthonian humala, humal, in all the Slavic 
tongues khmelz, in Magyar komlb, in Modern Greek choumeli, etc. 
Thus the word, even in its transformations, would point to the 
custom having originated on the Lower Rhine ; the German 
Franks, or even the Celtic Belgians would be the inventors of 
the bitter drink, and the hypothesis of Linnaeus would fall to 
the ground. 

But may not the Slavic khmeli be the ancestor of all the other 
names for the hop ? May it not be the Slavic form of the Greek 
smilax, smites, which, though not our hop, was a rough and 
climbing plant ? It is worthy of note that among the Slavs the 
word has the general sense of intoxication, all its derivatives 
meaning " tipsy, to get drunk," and the like. This meaning is 
very ancient, as is seen by a passage in Zonaras of the year 1120, 
where humeli is "a drink that without wine intoxicates," just as 
the same Slavic word is now used for brandy and its effects. A 
proverbial formula in the Russian chronicler Nestor points to 
a period still older When, in the year 6493 a.m. (985 a.d.), 
Vladimir marched against and conquered the Bolgars on the 
Volga, who wore boots, he was advised by Dobrynia to leave the 
boot-wearers alone, for he could get no tribute out of them, and 
turn to those who wore shoes of bast. Then Vladimir made 
peace with the Bolgars, which they promised to keep "till the 
stone shall float and the hop-leaf sink." 

The hop still plays a part in Russian marriage ceremonies as it 
did in the fifteenth century, and no doubt long before. When 



362 THE HOP. 



Helena, the daughter of Ivan III. (Vasilievitch), was married to 
the Grand Duke Alexander of Lithuania, at Wilna, the Boyar 
maidens unbraided her hair in the Church of the Virgin, put the 
kika (a head-dress in the shape of a magpie) on her head, and 
covered her with hops. Here also the hop symbolizes feasting, 
merry-making, and abundance. If, then, the Slavs introduced 
their plant into Germany, and the Germans adopted its Slavic 
name, then the Latin humulns and all the forms with b and p 
must have come from that name. 

According to another derivation, Pliny's lupus may have lost 
its / in France (that being taken for the Def. Art.), and then, 
by confusion with the verb to hop, have been changed into hoppe 
(as upupa has become hop-hop and wiede-hopf). In support of 
this would be the fact that lupus, from its very name, must have 
been a bitter plant like lupinus, the wolf-bean, which is named 
from that quality, and which even the ancient Egyptians mixed 
with their beer. 

Whichever of these derivations may be considered most probable, 
it cannot be denied that hop, humulus, and khmeli are only varie- 
ties of the same word, which were formed in passing from mouth 
to mouth. It was the Middle Ages that propagated the plant, 
and thereby created the true modern European beer, which is 
very different from the beer that used to be drunk out of cow- 
horns. At present Bohemia and Bavaria on the continent, then 
especially England, and, across the ocean, America, are the 
countries where not only the most but also the finest hops are 
cultivated ; in the east of Europe, where this vine of the north 
was perhaps indigenous, there are now produced very few and 
coarse hops. In this case also is repeated the frequently observed 
fact, that a plant under human cultivation develops nobler qualities 
on a new soil than it ever possessed in a wild condition in its 
native land (note 87). 



RETROSPECT. 

We have now crossed the threshold of the Middle Ages, and it 
behoves us, at this point, to look both backward and forward at 
some general facts. 

The result of the long process of assimilation, whose separate 
factors we have been trying to realize, was a homogeneity of 
culture in all the seaboard countries of the Mediterranean. And 
this homogeneity was exhibited outwardly in the unity of the 
Roman Empire, which was intrinsically a compendium of the 
countries lying round that inland sea. The garden-like culture 
and the most important cultivated plants of that region were of 
Semitic origin, and, like Christianity, had issued from its south- 
eastern corner. The once barbarous countries of Greece, Italy, 
Provence, and Spain, forest-regions with raw products, now pre- 
sented a picture of blooming, and in some respects, degenerated 
culture in little, with pruning-hook, mattock, and spades, water- 
courses and cisterns, shorn trees, fish-ponds, and trellised aviaries, 
just as in Canaan or Cilicia. The summer foliage and swelling 
outlines of the northern flora had given place to the stiff forms 
of a plastic, motionless, evergreen, and dark-coloured vegetation. 
Cypresses, laurels, pines, myrtles, pomegranates, and strawberry- 
trees, etc., encircled the homesteads of men, or, running wild, 
clothed the rocks and promontories of the coast. Greece and 
Italy left the forming hand of history as essentially evergreen 
countries without summer rains, and with irrigation as the prime 
condition of prosperity and the greatest care of the planter. They 
had orientalized — or, more strictly, semitized — themselves in the 
course of antiquity, and even the date-palm was not wanting as a 
living proof of this remarkable metamorphosis. 



364 RETROSPECT. 



Meanwhile, another and later influence of culture accompanies 
the Semitic stream from the countries south of the Caucasus. We 
may distinguish the two main constituents of the cultivated flora 
of the Mediterranean as the Syrian and the Armenian — taking 
the two words in the widest sense. The Armenian trees, while 
richer in fruit and more luxuriant than the primitive vegetation of 
Southern Europe, can stand the cold of winter better than the 
offspring of Syria ; and when we are in doubt as to the origin of 
one of these foreign plants, we need only examine whether it keeps 
strictly south of the Alps, and perhaps of the Cevennes, or ventures 
under cultivation to cross, though may be in rare and degenerate 
specimens, that climatic wall of partition. The non-existence of 
the nut-pine in Germany, and even in France, teaches us that that 
tree cannot have come from Asia Minor. That the vine belonged 
originally to the South Caspian countries, but was brought to us 
by the Syrians, we recognise by its behaviour in Europe : it is only 
in the south of this continent that the vine bears abundantly and 
naturally, that it spreads itself comfortably out, and leads, so to 
speak, a careless life. But still it can be cultivated in Silesia ; it 
has here and there strayed into the German woods; and on 
favourable soil, like that of Champagne ; in sheltered valleys, as on 
the Rhine; on volcanic hills, like those of Hungary — it yields, with 
the help of culture, very fine fruit. The fig is a Semitic tree ; and 
such, above all, is the olive, the queen of the Midland Sea, which 
founded its moderately large and strictly limited kingdom, not 
from Cyzicus or Sinope, but from Byblus and Gaza. On the 
contrary, the nut-trees, both walnut and chestnut, are eminently 
Pontic and Caspian plants. The chestnut scales the mountains 
of the Hesperian peninsula in dense broad columns, heedless of 
the cool breath of the heights, and has driven in the beeches to 
the upper slopes ; and even in the west of Central Germany the 
walnut-tree skirts the roads, and the chestnuts cluster in modest 
little woods. With an intelligent delight in nature, Joseph us 
described this mingling of different trees from dissimilar climatic 
zones in the Mediterranean flora, with special reference to the 
district around the Lake of Genezareth : " There the grape and fig, 
those kings of fruits, ripen almost uninterruptedly ; side by side 



RETROSPECT. 



3t>S 



with the fig and olive-trees, which delight in a milder air, stand an 
infinitude of walnut-trees, which are the most winterly plants (i.e., 
of northern origin), and of date-palms, the hottest, nourish them- 
selves on heat. It seems as if Nature were ambitious to make 
the fruit-plants of opposite climates vie with each other here." 
Columella says much the same thing of Italy. That many plants 
which lived in warm Persia beyond Armenia and Syria, and even 
originally in tropical India, could be naturalized in South Europe, 
was, among others, proved most brilliantly by the orange ; and as 
one of the most useful of domestic animals, the fowl, had come 
from the countries of the Indus and Ganges about 600 years 
before Christ, so, about 600 years after Christ, as in proof that the 
movement of exchange had not fully subsided, came the Arachosian 
ox or buffalo. 

In the first century B.C., the wide empire of which Italy was the 
centre — that is, the geographical region of antique culture — had 
attained its completion ; as one immense colony of the East it 
surrounded the Mediterranean on all sides. The frontier pro- 
vinces on the Euphrates to the East, and on the Rhine and 
Danube to the North, formed extreme and fluctuating acquisitions, 
with a different character ; appendages too remote from the 
inland sea round which the classic world was grouped. But within 
these natural limits and the correspondingly fixed unbending 
framework of customs and of life, culture began to be stifled. 
During the first centuries of the Christian era there was visibly 
going on a continuous and rapid process of decay, which, like an 
incurable disease, finally led to dissolution. It is easy to com- 
pare this at first sight enigmatical fact, which had no externally 
constraining causes, to the ageing and dying of an individual 
organism; but as nations and epochs are neither plants nor 
animals, this favourite image gives no direct information about the 
process itself and its real operating causes. Perhaps some of these 
may be found in the following considerations. 

A fundamental fault, and perhaps the true seat of disease, in 
antique civilization was the uneconomical construction of society and 
the State, and the accompanying absence of all realistic-technical 
sense in men. Under the Roman emperors the world became 



?66 RETROSPECT. 



poorer and poorer, and therefore more and more disheartened and 
oppressed. The taxes rose reign after reign, and still did not bring 
in what was wanted ; it became harder and harder, and at last 
impossible to collect them. The means were resorted to of 
farming them out to the highest bidder ; and these publicani 
compensated themselves by merciless extortion, just as in France 
before the Revolution. In the cities a few rich citizens, invested 
with high but honorary office, had to answer for the commune, 
and they and their fortunes fell a prey to the fiscus. In this distress 
the emperors had recourse to debasement of the coinage — a paper 
currency as legal tender had not yet been invented — the conse- 
quence of which was that prices rose and living became dearer 
and dearer. The latter fact was then attributed to the selfishness 
and malice of the vendors and merchants, and accordingly the 
celebrated edict was promulgated by the Emperor Diocletian, fixing 
the maximum price of all provisions, raw materials, wages, and 
common manufactures ; a striking proof of the rudeness of the 
prevailing ideas on national economy — which, however, was exactly 
reproduced in the so-called Law of the Maximum of 1793. Any- 
thing beyond curing the symptoms, particularly any thought of 
meeting the increased demands of the State by unfettering 
production, and setting economic action free, never occurred to 
anybody. It is true, the Romans had built roads and bridges that 
still excite our admiration, but these rather served to increase the 
glory and grandeur of the rulers of the world, and the facility of 
military and administrative operations, than to further the aims of 
trade and intercourse. They were blocked by inland tolls, and 
these again were in the hands of governmental farmers, with all 
the evils and vexatious practices of such a system. Export and 
import prohibitions on the frontiers, unnatural corn-laws, etc., 
stopped the circulation of goods, and consequently the growth of 
capital and wealth. Added to this were the State monopolies, the 
number of which was continually increasing, and the Imperial 
factories, that worked with only seeming advantage. The in- 
satiable greed of the millitary State, which was kept almost 
constantly on a war-footing, could not be appeased by any amount 
of production on the part of the agricultural and manufacturing 



RETROSPECT. 367 



population ; what the taxes left was consumed in the quartering 
and provisioning of the troops. The soldiers, to whom, even 
before the end of the Republic, lands in Italy had been forcibly 
and arbitrarily apportioned, now played the first role. They 
were for the most part unmarried, they squandered in sensual 
pleasures what they had collected in war, and were lazy and 
inclined to excesses (note 88). In the undeveloped condition of 
finance, and ignorance of the natural laws that govern it, money- 
dealing and the easy circulation of capital could be no element of 
increasing wealth. The rate of interest rose to an unheard-of 
height, and the prohibitions intended to limit usury only made the 
matter worse. 

As the taking of interest at all was in ancient times considered 
despicable and indeed unlawful, so also the principle of the 
division of labour was not comprehended. Cato and Varro 
positively warn men against it : the former says the landlord ought 
to be a seller and no buyer; the latter, that whatever can be made 
by the people on the estate should not be purchased elsewhere. 
So home-work was not reckoned as money expended ; and the 
larger households kept their own smiths, joiners, shoemakers, 
coopers, etc., while in the cities there was no class of working 
tradesmen and artisans. No wonder that technics remained im- 
perfect, for, besides all this, the ancients were not naturally addicted 
to handicraft. To observe, without prejudice, the naked reality 
of things, to adapt means to ends, and so emancipate themselves, 
were not a characteristic feature of the ancients. They lived, an 
aristocratic race, in a dream of religious fancy, in an ideal show, 
swayed by a passion for artistic representation, and spellbound 
by the Beautiful. If we examine the remains of Pompeian tools 
and utensils, how tastefully and elegantly they are designed, 
though wrought, perhaps, by the hand of a slave; but, for the 
most part, how childishly ! The rational technics that do please 
us in them were not the result of sober observation and sensible 
calculation, but an old tradition, beyond which they did not go, 
and which could not but deteriorate from generation to generation. 
And, as technics sank, so did taste, so did the grace and purity of 
forms and nobility of thought. For these are not absolutely 



368 RETROSPECT. 



separated; what is gained by technics also serves the intellect; 
every extension of its limits gained by the former allows the latter 
a higher flight into a hitherto unknown world. If, for example, 
the ancients had been able to develop in a more varied manner 
their scanty musical instruments, and to invent, say, the organ 
and the fiddle — which is first found among the Arabs — there is no 
doubt they would also have put a new soul into their music. 

How stationary the mechanical arts remained among the 
Romans, and how far they were from regarding nature as an 
object of intelligent inquiry, is particularly shown by the history 
of Roman navigation and Roman agriculture. The size and 
limits of the immense empire afforded occasion enough for ventur- 
ing on the high seas. The rulers of the world were in possession 
of the Iberian, Lusitanian, and Mauritanian coasts ; yet Pliny was 
obliged to describe the not distant Canary Isles from the jottings- 
down of King Juba; it never occurred to Roman seamen or 
traders to venture so far. The island of Hibernia, on which, 
perhaps, Pytheas had landed three centuries before Christ, re- 
mained a sort of cloud-land to the Romans ; it lay hidden some- 
where behind the dangerous Bay of Biscay and the stormy rock- 
bound Irish Channel. The Roman ships were nothing but coast- 
ing vessels, which feared every foam-whipped promontory and 
ran into harbour on the approach of winter. The winds, waves, 
and seasons were regarded in a mythic sense ; the ship's beak was 
artistically carved and the ship itself imperfectly constructed. 
The Red Sea had long carried on a brisk trade with India, and 
Strabo learned that one hundred and twenty ships annually left 
the port of Myos Hormos for that distant land ; but neither the 
Indian numeral system nor the magnet-needle reached the Roman 
West, which, tethered in its own narrow circle, was indifferent to 
anything new, and derived no enrichment or incitement from the 
East, as Europe did in the Arab period. To the north-east, on 
the Pontus Euxinus, it was the same as on the Red Sea. The 
Romans possessed a number of fortified places on the shores of 
the Pontus, but the trade that passed through those districts was 
all in the hands of Asiatics, and no progress was made in the 
geography of the Caspian Sea. How different the activity of the 



RETROSPECT. 369 

Genoese there during the Middle Ages, citizens as they were of 
a small town, and not protected, like the avis Romanus^ by the 
awe and majesty of the Roman name ! When they had firmly 
planted themselves in the Crimea, they explored the Caspian in 
their own ships, and their merchants settled in numbers at Tauris 
(Tavriz), in Persia. There they were found by another Italian, 
the Venetian Marco Polo, when he passed that way, both to 
traverse the whole enormous continent and then, like a Herodotus 
of the Middle Ages, to describe it. The Roman was not the man 
to do either ; he had not a mind open to the outside world ; where 
he could not conquer, nor lay down his own political, social, legal, 
and military forms in regular lines like a piece of masonry, there 
was no fascination for him ; that was not the atmosphere in which 
he could live and move. 

Roman agriculture resembled Roman seafaring ; in it, also, there 
was no developing impulse. The tools were still the imperfect 
ones handed down by their forefathers ; the methods were the 
traditional ones, or at best increased by others just as unscientific, 
forming a medley of purely practical experiences, real or supposed, 
and of superstitious fancy. Manuring and the rotation of crops 
were known, but not duly valued nor carried out to their conse- 
quences. At last the soil was exhausted, cornfields were changed 
into pastures, famines were frequent, and the importation of grain 
became a principal care of the Government. Italy produced on 
an average only the fourth part of the corn consumed. The true 
reason of this want of success lay in the high price of labour, 
which, in turn, was the result of economical and technical in- 
aptitude and indifference to natural science. 

Among the reasons that led to the destruction of ancient society, 
it is common to give the first rank to the practice of slavery. It 
is certainly one of the things that are incompatible with the highest 
industrial development, but at certain stages of civilization — leaving 
out of consideration the quality of race and the difficult political 
and social problems therewith connected — it is a natural, and even 
sometimes a beneficent, institution. It existed, also, among the 
barbarians, who put an end to the antique life ; it was continued 
with undiminished force in Germanic-Romance Europe, where i* 

24 



370 



RETROSPECT. 



naturally and gradually disappeared, passing through several stages, 
in consequence of the progress of economical culture. In most 
respects the condition of the slaves and coloni of Rome differed 
only in name from the severe domestic servitude and feudal con- 
stitution of property that prevailed in modern Europe until not 
very long ago. Nay, in the condition of slavery there was often 
preserved a remnant of popular rights. At all events, the slave 
could not be dragged from the plough to the camp of the legions, 
while the free population was decimated by conscription and only 
gradually recruited itself by the frequent manumissions. Even in 
Rome, if the times had not otherwise been so hopelessly retro- 
grade, slavery could not always have maintained itself in face of 
the growth of economical and political power. 

One result of this general misery was the unchecked spread of 
the new and visionary religion from the East, which opened to the 
despairing race of men a saving retreat into the innermost recesses 
of the soul. Christianity, while it " dissolved the depths of the 
heart " and placed the one thing needful in the inner man, by 
that very means undermined the foundations on which rested the 
ancient world. The Christian, to whom the poor were the blessed, 
and to die was gain, cared little for the acquisition and increase of 
earthly goods ; his spirit lived in another world beheld by faith, 
and he laid up for himself treasures in heaven. We know that 
amid the general decay of intellectual production, Jurisprudence, 
that root and core of the Roman nature, not only held its ground, 
but went on flourishing. Yet in the long series of successive 
jurists there is scarcely one Christian; what should such care 
about regulating the conditions of this brief pilgrimage ? His 
life was given him to save his soul, not to settle legal claims. He 
was even indifferent to a knowledge of nature and every kind of 
science ; in believing he possessed all truth, and in any case the 
end of things present was to be expected daily. Also in the 
Roman camp the convert to the new religion faced the enemy 
with very different feelings from those of the true Roman of the 
old time. Victory was no joy to him, and defeat and death only 
set him free from earthly tribulation, or served as a wholesome 
trial. His real enemy was the heathen, with his worship of beauty 



RETROSPECT, 371 



and his self-content. Thus war and law, those pillars of Rome, 
were deprived by the breath of the new Christian spirit of their 
hold and their supporting power. 

Another slowly operating destructive force, identical at bottom 
with that of Christianity, was the mixture of races, the intrusion 
of Oriental blood into the population of the West. The Roman 
Empire comprised, in one general political framework, very diverse 
elements of very unequal cultural value. Rome was a pande- 
monium of diverse National minds, some unripe and crude, others 
hardened and fettered in world-old traditions. Inflexibly as the 
Roman State might subject these dim forces of nature to the rule 
of common sense, it was still being gradually destroyed by their 
secret action. The rapid fall was only a consequence of the 
transformation of race. Natives of Africa and Egypt, Orientals 
of every type, European and Asiatic Greeks, Spanish Iberians, 
Illyrians, and Thracians, deluged Italy, intermarried with each 
other, took possession of the organs of the State, of education, 
and of literature, and not seldom even mounted the Imperial 
throne. As early as the time of Cicero and Caesar, all the cities, 
and Rome among them, were crowded with the circumcised, who 
were agreed among themselves ; and however senseless and anti- 
human their opinions seemed to the Romans, yet with their stub- 
born bent of mind they imperceptibly revolutionized the general 
consciousness. It was the Jewish communities that in the first 
instance paved the way for Christianity, and scattered the germs 
of it, not only in outlying quarters of the capital, but in all the 
provinces. Any one who should nakedly assert that it was not the 
Germans, but the Jews, that destroyed the Roman Empire, would 
be saying too much, and yet would be nearer the truth than the 
ignorant might imagine. 

" Oh that Judea had never been subdued by Pompey and 
Titus ! " complains Rutilius Numatianus, in his " Itinerarium." 
"Thence comes, and now spreads far and wide, the infective 
matter, and those who were once conquered fasten the yoke on 
the necks of their conquerors ! " 



MODERN EUROPE. 

The limits of ancient culture were burst open in anotner and 
brighter direction by the entrance of North-Western and Central 
Europe into the history of mankind. This breach was first 
effected by the great Caesar, when he conquered Gaul and Bel- 
gium, and set foot in Britain and Germany. Over those new 
territories blew the breath of the ocean, and endless forests of 
gigantic trees shaded the virgin soil. Frequent rains and mists 
kept the land moist even in summer ; the trees shed their leaves 
in autumn, and in winter the fen-lands froze into firm ground. 
In contrast to the limited scenes of the mountainous South 
European peninsulas, and the crowded horticulture of the East 
and South, the Northern plains stretched on all sides in vast 
unenclosed expanses, and the life within them bore the stamp of 
these larger proportions, as the wave of the ocean is broader than 
that of the inland sea. Where the ground was cultivated, as in 
Gaul, the corn grew in innumerable fields ; but everywhere 
beyond was the forest-region, the home of large game and beasts 
of prey — the farther east from the Rhine the more rarely inter- 
rupted by sporadic culture. 

Civilization was at its commencement, especially among the 
Britons, Belgians, and Germans ; it was already more advanced 
among the Gauls, but still in its infancy compared with Italy, the 
heiress of Greece and the East. Nevertheless, the Central Euro- 
pean and Transalpine technics of life, though undeveloped, had 
many advantages arising spontaneously out of the climate, vegeta- 
tion, and soil, or the totally different point of departure. We 
could count up a whole series of inventions that came to the 



MODERN EUROPE. 373 



Romans from Gaul, but which they rather noted down than made 
a practical use of; we will only mention, as examples, the wheeled 
plough, the carriage called rheda, soap, the linen shirt, and 
manuring with marl. 

In the religious, moral, and juridical conceptions of Britons 
and Germans, the Romans found their own long-forgotten in- 
fancy again : they had developed this primitive condition by a 
long succession of stages, into a firmly fixed and variously accom- 
modated system, carried out in detail, and everywhere penetrated 
by shrewd intelligence, and rich experience of human life ; but 
this invaluable acquisition of culture had stiffened into conven- 
tion, and was felt as a fetter; among the Germans there still 
existed a direct, rude, but fresh natural sentiment ; and thoughtful 
Romans, like Tacitus, longed for these beginnings of life, which 
they describe with unmistakable partiality, and which, in a kindly 
illusion, fanned them like the breath of freedom. 

To elucidate this attitude of the old civilized nations towards 
the Northern inhabitants of the forest, compare the popular epics 
and lyrics of the Germans to the tragedies of Seneca : the former 
are elementary, but penetrated with inherent poetry ; the latter 
belong to a higher class of art (to which the whole of the Middle 
Ages was not able to rise), and bear the stamp of exquisite taste, 
but the spirit has fled — in the one, we have fancy and feeling far 
in excess of the power of expression ; in the other, a frosty appli- 
cation of once inspired but now hollow forms. The ancient 
Greeks saw, often with wondering sympathy, a similar but more 
glaring contrast between themselves and the Pontus regions, 
which were so poor and wretched, and yet again so rich. Thither 
the Greek ships took wine and oil, the twofold symbol of antique 
culture, " and whatever else civilized life has to offer," says 
Strabo ; and received in return corn, skins, cattle, honey, and — 
powerful human bodies for service and labour (Polybius). Very 
early the Greeks had found in that northern land a race of the 
justest men ; and even a wise philosopher, Anacharsis, the far- 
travelled author of beneficial inventions, had there his home 
Greeks had settled in the heart of Scythia, as Roman tradesmen 
did in the capital of Maroboduus. But no new creation resulted 



374 MODERN EUROPE. 



from the contact of Hellenes with the peasants and nomads north 
of the Pontus, and still less a new epoch : one national wave after 
another washed away all that had gone before ; Turkish tribes 
rode forth from the wilds of Asia, trampling down harvests and 
men; Slavs from the north poured over the Danube to the 
Adriatic Sea, and deep into the Greek peninsula ; and lastly, 
following these, a Finnish race from the Ural pushed its way 
through the midst of them, and occupied the beautiful Pannonia, 
once inhabited by civilized men of noble race, but now become a 
horse-pasture. 

It was otherwise in the West. There, even when Rome 
politically was fallen, Italy, Spain, Gaul, the British Isles, and 
Germany still formed an internally united whole, the European 
community of nations, whose ideal centre was the Eternal City. 
To this scene of action of the Middle Ages the Byzantine Empire 
in the East stood related very much as Western Asia had once 
been to the Greeks : in many respects more cultivated, but 
enslaved and deeply degenerate, with barbarians encamped around 
it. In the intercourse between the North and South, between 
the Teutons and Rome, lies the sum and substance of Mediaeval 
history. From Germany had come the hosts that reduced the 
proud military-administrative edifice of the empire to ruins ; they 
worked as liberators, because they substituted individual life 
for a closely dovetailed, iron-bound unity. On the other hand, 
Germany, even before the great Migration, had not been able to 
resist the seductions of Southern culture ; and now, during the 
Middle Ages, experienced a constant Romanizing process that 
gradually penetrated all its veins ; its woods were rooted up, 
settlements, and very soon towns, were founded, and the customs, 
modes of government, and laws invented by antiquity were applied 
on the new ground. An important centre of the fluctuating move- 
ment of civilization was Belgium. There, at the time of Caesar, 
dwelt warlike Celts, who still retained the sound freshness of 
nature ; resembling the Germans, oppressed by them, but finally 
mixing with them ; afterwards becoming a model to the Germans 
of advanced civilization, of agriculture, industry, and freedom, and 
to the old Roman countries a source of youth. Belgium, North- 



MODERN EUROPE. 375 



east France, and the Rhineland on both sides of the river, 
seemed destined to become a peculiar kingdom with an individual 
stamp, a link between the two halves of Europe ; but this ten- 
dency was not fulfilled, and that region remained an uncertain 
border-land, sometimes falling to the one, sometimes to the other 
part. But it was colonists from Flanders who taught the Germans 
the higher forms of agriculture ; from Burgundy proceeded cloth 
and linen weaving; there, too (in St. Denys, Rheims, etc.), Gothic 
architecture was invented, and a thick crop of cities and cathe- 
drals, each mightier than the other, was sown abroad. There the 
fables of Rein eke Fuchs circulated, and the fanatic fantastic idea 
of the Crusades was first engendered ; there the most modern of 
arts, music, had its birthplace, and oil-painting, if not invented, 
was at least applied and perfected. But while Germany was being 
educated and instructed by antique culture, it was also enlarging 
the circuit of Europe by unflagging colonization towards the East 
— one of the greatest and never too highly to be estimated pheno- 
mena, of the Middle Ages. In the South this Germanic expan- 
sion proceeded from the Bavarians, following the course of the 
Danube; in the North from the Saxons, crossing the Elbe, the 
Oder, and the Vistula, and reaching far up the coast of the Baltic : 
in the former set of Germanized countries the Nibelungen legends 
at least received their last form, and the colonial town of Vienna 
rose to be an imperial capital ; in the latter, Copernicus made his 
appearance, and, centuries after, Kant, Fichte, Winckelmann, 
and Humboldt were born ; and while in the South the kingdom 
of St. Stephen was drawn within the circle of the New European 
civilization, in the North the wide territory of the Piasts and 
Jagellons was opened to the intellectual life of the West. 

When Germans had thus inundated the Western Empire, and 
Turks and Slavs the northern half of the Greek Empire ; on the 
other hand, from the seventh century, to complete the destruction 
of the ancient world, the storm of Arabs broke loose over Syria 
and the still blooming north coast of Africa. In the first rage of 
Islam the destruction was fearful, and has never to this day been 
made good — " when buds a new belief," the work of many past gene- 
rations is " uprooted like an evil weed ; " but after the first fanatic 



376 MODERN EUROPE. 



paroxysm was over, the Arabs increased the capital of culture in- 
herited from antiquity by many valuable contributions — for example, 
the compass, the so-called Arabic numerals, the beginnings of 
chemistry and pharmacy, of commercial and harbour praxis, many 
new plants, and so on. Arabian culture itself passed away as a 
mere episode, but what it had brought with it was farther de- 
veloped in the West ; and when the Italian seaports nourished and 
instituted banks and exchange, when gunpowder and linen-paper 
were invented and more generally employed, then, after long 
centuries of barbarism and superstition, a turning-point was 
reached, from which life began again to rise. If the Romans had 
been able to make the last two discoveries, perhaps the enormous 
break in the steady advance of culture, which we call the Middle 
Ages, would have been avoided. At the sound of gunpowder the 
Huns would perhaps have fled back into their steppes, and paper 
might have prevented the destruction of Graeco-Roman literature 
— for what we possess are only miserable and scattered fragments. 
In the fifteenth century Italy had become so much stronger again, 
that Humanism, not only literary, but moral and political, could 
pick up the thread which antiquity in its exhaustion had dropped- 
The world opened itself to the eye which had recovered its sight ; 
men felt once more the joy of existing in the midst of Nature, and 
began to long for a knowledge of her laws and her mysterious 
being. Armed with the magnet, bold seamen sailed from Lusitania 
and Iberia to America, the East Indies and China ; before them 
spread, in thousandfold abundance, the natural wonders of the 
New World that Seneca had once foreboded — for it was not given 
to the Roman to do more than forebode. Mathematics, physics, 
mechanics, astronomy, anatomy, and botany, bestirred themselves 
with youthful zeal — the Church observed them mistrustfully, but 
could no longer stifle them ; by help of knife and balance, crucible 
and retort, lever and pump, thermometer and barometer, telescope 
and microscope, pendulum, logarithms, and infinitesimal calcula- 
tion, the ever fuller and more comprehensive liberation of humanity 
was prepared. That which distinguishes the modern from the 
ancient world is natural science, technics, and political economy. 
Turning from these general observations to our immediate 



MODERN EUROPE. 377 



theme, the nomenclature of the German language teaches us that, 
from the Migration of Nations till far into the Middle Ages, all 
the produce of German gardens and a great part of agricultural 
practices were introduced from Italy and Gaul or South France. 
As far as the climate permitted, whatever Italy had either possessed 
from the first, or had acquired from Greece and Asia, was natura- 
lized by a continued migration of culture. Not only the tree- 
fruits — pears, cherries, plums, mulberries, grapes, and all the 
manipulations of pressing, wine-making, including the keller 
(cellar), the tonne and kufe (tun, coop), the flasche (bottle), becher 
(beaker), kelch (chalice), krug (crock, a Celtic word) — but also 
flowers, vegetables, kitchen and medicinal herbs, like kohl {caulis, 
cabbage) and kabes, kappes (caputium), erbse (ervum, pea), vicia 
(vetch), linse (lens, lentil), petersilie (parsley), zwiebel (onion), 
kiimmel (cummin), beete (beet-root, Slavic sveklu, a corruption of 
seutlon), rettich (radish, which the Romans themselves got from 
Syria under the first emperors as radix Syria), meer-rettich (quasi 
mare-radish, corrupted from armoracia), miinze {?nentha, mint), 
coriander, kerbel (chervil), liebstockel {libisticum for ligusticum, 
lovage), lavender, melisse (balm), polei (pulegium, penny-royal), 
fenchel (fennel), anise, karde (teasel), lattich (lactuca, lettuce), 
spargel (asparagus), and many others — have names derived from 
Latin ; sichel (sickle) is the Latin secula ; flegel (flail), flagellum ; 
mergel (marl), marga, margila ; speicher (granary), spicarium ; 
butter and cheese (kase), horse and ambling palfrey (pferd, zelter) 
are Latin ; so are the weights and measures : meile, centner (cwt), 
pfund, scheffel (bushel, from scaphum, scapilus), seidel (pint, from 
situla), etc. Charlemagne's " Capitulare de villis " and the "Speci- 
men breviarii rerum fiscalium " give a distinct picture of how the 
Italian or Gallic villa, with all its belongings, plants, animals, and 
the necessary utensils and modes of labour, was transferred to 
German soil. In Italy itself, in spite of the Migration and the 
chaotic dissolution, the number of cultivated plants and of useful 
domestic animals had not as a whole diminished, so tough is pri- 
vate life, and so unweariedly in its small circles do healing and 
restoration go side by side with destruction. During the thousand 
years of the Middle Ages down to the discovery of America, we 



378 MODERN EUROPE. 

have not one tame animal more to record ; the number remained 
stationary in spite of the movements in Inner Asia, the great 
Arabic dominion from the Indus to the Tagus, and the incursions 
of Turks and Mongols. But these events enriched the Western 
flora with some integral members, among which, as is only right, 
we will first consider the fruits of the field. 



THE RICE-PLANT. 

(ORYZA SATIVA.) 

The rice-plant, which grows on damp rich bottoms in tropical and 
and sub-tropical climates, was everywhere cultivated in India from 
ancient times. The marshy nature of the soil at the mouth of the 
Indus must have been particularly favourable to this kind of 
grain ; but even in dry and more elevated lands the sowing could 
be so timed, that the tropical rain falling at stated periods should 
nourish the springing plants. Though poorer in real nourishment 
than wheat, rice was and is the food of greater masses of people 
than wheat, not only in India proper, but in the peninsula beyond 
the Ganges, in the South of China, and the islands of the Indian 
Ocean, till in the extreme East the sago-palm takes the place of 
this cultivated grass. In the region thus described, rice is only 
wanting in mountainous places where there is not sufficient warmth, 
or where the monsoon rains cease, and artificial irrigation is im- 
possible. Rice is in so far no real bread-material, that it is seldom 
ground and baked ; it is generally eaten as a kind of porridge 
consisting of white and swollen grains, often mixed with fat of 
some kind or other, called by the ancient Greeks chondros, or grain- 
porridge, and by the Latins alica, or frumenty. The art of pre- 
paring an alcoholic drink, arrac, from rice, is an old Indian one, 
for the Greeks had already heard of it ; although what Strabo and 
^Elian speak of could not have been the strong distilled waters 
that we now call arrac and rum, but rather a kind of beer or wine. 
The Sanskrit name of rice was vrihi (not yet in the Rig-veda but 
in the Atharva-veda) ; this, passing into the Iranic languages 
would become brizi ; and out of this Old Persic form the Greeks 



3 8o THE RICE-PLANT. 



made their oryza, oryzon, whence came, through the Latin, the 
name used by all the nations of modern Europe. 

The West first made acquaintance with rice during the wars 
of Alexander the Great, though some doubtful traces point to 
the middle of the fifth century B.C. Athenseus says that Sophocles 
had spoken of an orindes artos, which later authors explained as 
bread either made of rice, or of an Ethiopian grain like sesame. 
If Sophocles himself connected this orindes artos with the Ethio- 
pians, he might mean Homer's Ethiopians, who " dwelt towards 
the rising of the sun," or the Ethiopians of his friend Herodotus, 
i.e., the inhabitants of the countries of the Lower Indus and the 
neighbouring coasts ; and then both meanings would have agreed. 
The nasalized form orinda, orindion, agrees remarkably with the 
Armenian brinz, Persic hiring or birang 

Herodotus himself, who had already heard of the wool which 
grew on trees (cotton), mentions a tribe of Indians who fed on a 
wild plant, the grains of which, about the size of millet, were 
enclosed in a husk, together with which they were boiled and 
eaten. This also may be rice ; the faults in the description — for 
example, that rice, which at the time of Herodotus had long 
been a cultivated plant, is called wild— may be explained by the 
uncertainty arising from the distance at which the marvellous 
land of India was observed. Herodotus does not seem to 
have known of any name for the grain he described. When the 
Macedonians conquered Asia, the Indian rice became fully known 
to the Greeks. Theophrastus correctly describes the plant, and 
the use made of it. Aristobulus, who had accompanied Alex- 
ander on his Asiatic campaigns, and who, when very aged, wrote 
a history of the king, and a description of the countries he had 
traversed ; not only describes with surprising correctness (as 
quoted by Strabo), the mode of cultivating rice ; but mentions 
Bactriana (on the Upper Oxus), Babylonia and Susis (both Semitic 
regions on the Lower Euphrates and Tigris), as lands where rice 
was cultivated. The last item is confirmed by Diodorus, who, 
describing the battles between Eumenes and Seleucus, says that 
the first, having no corn, fed his troops in Susiana on rice, sesame, 
and dates, in which products that district was uncommonly rich 



RICE. 38] 



So that, during the Persian dominion, and no doubt as a con- 
sequence of it, the cultivation of rice had advanced from the 
Indus to the Oxus and Euphrates, and thence also was derived 
the name oryza. (The words, " and Lower Syria produces it too," 
may be an addition of Strabo's own, in whose time the circle of 
this culture had widened.) A third informant, Megasthenes (an 
agent of King Seleucus in the far East about 300 B.C.), had seen 
how rice was eaten at Indian courts, and no doubt himself shared 
in such meals : each of the guests had a kind of table in the 
shape of a stand set before him, on which was a golden dish; 
into this dish boiled rice was poured, and then mixed with 
various ingredients of Indian manufacture. So in that ancient 
time the pilav, now common all over the East, was in general 
use. After the founding of the Greek kingdom in Egypt, there 
was a brisk trade carried on in rice, as well as other Indian 
products, to the ports of that country by way of the Persian Gulf 
and Red Sea. The Greek and Roman physicians used rice for 
making a glutinous drink, and rice is now and then mentioned as 
serving that purpose. From a passage in Horace, where a miser 
is prescribed such a beverage and is shocked at the price, we 
learn that rice was then dear : the distance from which it came, 
and the fact that it easily spoiled, must have increased its price. 
It was not yet used as a common food — Apicius mentions it only 
once as an ingredient — and still less was any attempt made to 
cultivate the plant in the West. 

The merit of introducing rice into Europe is due to the Arabs 
in Spain. Being long acquainted with the grain through the 
Indo-Ethiopian trade which passed through their hands, and 
accustomed to rice as food, the Arabs, after conquering Egypt, 
had naturalized its cultivation in the Delta of the Nile, and in the 
Oases. In their endeavour to arrange their newly conquered lands 
on the model of those from which they came, the Moors would 
of course plant the watery lowlands of Spain with the favourite 
grain-bearing grass which is still so dear to the Orientals. For 
this purpose, besides the basins of the Guadiana and Guadalquivir, 
the fat marsh-lands of the province of Valencia were especially 
calculated, and then the Arabs, who were masters of irrigation,. 



382 THE RICE-PLANT. 



soon won from the soil the desired harvests, the surplus of which 
even reached the coasts of other European countries. After the 
gradual conquest of the Moorish kingdoms by the Christians, the 
Arabian rice-fields became the property of the ' latter, whose 
religion fortunately did not forbid them to continue the work of 
the infidels. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, and in 
the beginning of the sixteenth, when the world was bent upon 
renewing itself, and had not ceased to wonder at everything that 
came from Africa, India, and America ; when Spanish rule was 
established in Naples and then in Milan, while Italian commerce 
with the Levant still flourished; — the cultivation of rice was brought 
to Italy either from Spain or, after the example of the Spaniards, 
direct from Egypt, and was first carried out in the places where 
canalization and irrigation had been practised from of old, that 
is, in the Milanese and the Venetian republic. A source of wealth 
seemed thereby opened to the countryman, and every one applied 
himself with eagerness to the new culture, much as was the case 
with cotton in South Italy at the time of the Civil War in 
America. Pasture and wheat-lands, far and near, were turned 
into rice-fields; and from the mouths of the Alpine rivers, Po, 
Adige, etc., from the lowlands about Mantua, Ravenna, Ferrara, 
etc., the cultivation of that plant, which was in fact more profitable 
than the usual cereals, spread even to the upper districts, to the 
Romagna, Piedmont, and so on. But it was soon found that the 
whole country was thereby changed into an artificial swamp, and 
that fever and malaria increased to a fearful degree ; and though 
the greed of gain is great in that southern land, the fear of bad 
air and the evil effects of stagnant water is quite as potent. There 
began an opposition on the part of all the governments, which 
resulted, from the first half of the sixteenth until the present 
century, in a series of statutory limitations and prohibitions. 
Everywhere the rice-fields had to be so many miles distant from a 
large, and so many from a small town. Then followed still more 
rigorous ordinances, according to which only such land should be 
planted with rice as was too swampy for any other cultivation, 
and in the neighbourhood of which was no inhabited house or 
frequented high-road. A special commission of inspection, with 



RICE. 3^3 

out whose permission not a grain of rice could be sown, watched 
over the maintenance of the legal regulations. Though these 
limitations are still in force, the cultivation of rice is in a flourish- 
ing state in Venetia and Lombardy, and yields a considerable 
surplus for exportation. The cultivation itself demands much 
care and labour, no less in the first preparation of the level fields 
surrounded with dams and ditches, and the subsequent inlet and 
outlet of water, than during the harvest, and the thrashing, 
pounding, and cleansing of the grain. And then the constant 
wading and dabbling in mud and water, the hoeing, etc., have not 
the best effect on the health of the labourers and their children. 

In South Italy, where the heat and danger are still greater, the 
interference of the authorities was more active in proportion, so 
that whenever rice threatened to get the upper hand it was regu- 
larly put down, and is now limited to a few uninhabited districts. 
The produce of the whole peninsula in rice is calculated at more 
than two million hectolitres, of the value of about 70 to 100 
million lire. In Spain, this old Arabian culture has very much de- 
clined, probably in consequence of sanitary prohibitions ; it has 
quite disappeared from South France; in European Turkey, Busbe- 
quius in the sixteenth century saw rice-fields near Philippopolis. 
Though the quality of South European rice is generally excellent, 
the trade of that region is insignificant in comparison with the 
quantities that are brought to market from the East Indies, Java, 
and especially America. It happened with rice as it did with 
sugar, coffee, and cotton ; it was its introduction into the New 
World that first made it a world-product. The Southern States of 
the Union, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, and 
especially South Carolina, produce rice to the value of millions of 
pounds, and, in spite of the great distance, the prices compete 
with those of Italy. Europe was the half-way station for this 
produce, to which the Arabs, those old intermediaries between 
East and West, brought it, and from which others transported it 
further to the New Indies beyond the ocean. 



MAIZE. 

(ZEA MAIS.) 

America, in its turn, made a still more important present to the 
Old World in its maize, which now feeds a large part of South 
Europe and the Levant, and has penetrated to China and Japan, 
and to negro tribes in the very heart of Africa, who have never 
seen a European. Columbus already found this grain in His- 
paniola, and it was grown all over America as far as agriculture 
was practised and the climate permitted. From the beginning of 
the sixteenth century grains of it were sown in Spanish, Italian, 
French, German, and English gardens, and soon the plant was 
cultivated on a larger scale in the fields. The Venetians propa- 
gated it in the East ; under the name of kukuruz it became 
naturalized in Turkey, the Danubian countries, and Hungary, 
furnishing material for a favourite dish ; for example, the mamaliga 
of the Wallachians, in which plum-brandy, the so-called tchuka, 
must not be wanting. It came to Germany as Turkish wheat or 
walsch-korn from Italy. " Our Germany," says Hieronymus Bock 
(Tragus) in his "New Kreuterbuch," Strasburg, 1539, " will soon 
be called felix Arabia, because we accustom so many foreign 
plants to our soil from day to day, among which the large walsch- 
korn is not the least important." In North Italy polenta, that is, 
rnaize-porridge, is the usual food of the peasant ; and maize, 
especially in the fertile plains of the northern part of the peninsula, 
rivals wheat. Though the latter produces a better grain and finer 
flour, as well as more wholesome nourishment, it does not give so 
large a yield as the first, and has therefore been obliged to retreat 
step by step from the best soil (note 89). 



BLACK MILLET. 

(SORGUM VULGARE.) 

It must have been still easier to transplant the Black Millet, the 
dhorra and dokhn of the Arabs, from India to Europe, for it 
appeared in Italy shortly before the time of Pliny. He describes 
the plant exactly, and is also correct when he says that the sorgo 
is the most fruitful of all cereals. Unfortunately the value of this 
grain bears no proportion to its richness of production, and as 
it is not much recommended by its colour and taste, its culti- 
vation was very likely abandoned again. At least we hear no 
more of the dhorra after Pliny, and it was the Arabs that intro- 
duced the grain so common in the countries about the Red Sea 
and in the interior of Africa, to the Mediterranean lands for the 
second time. Peter de Crescentiis, about 1300 a.d., knows it 
under the name of milica (now melga, melica, and in other districts 
sagging sorgo), and describes it as being used for fodder, and, in 
time of scarcity, as being mixed with other flour. The different 
species and varieties of the plant are still found in Italy, but their 
cultivation is limited ; in a green state it is used as fodder, the 
grain serves to feed swine, for it is hurtful to birds, the beard 
for brooms or brushes according to size, and the straw for 
the plaited walls of simple huts. As rye is a too northern, so 
black millet is a too southern plant, a negro corn ; both of them, 
despised for their darkish flour, only straggle into Italy to each 
other's astonishment when they happen to meet (note 90). 



25 



BUCKWHEAT. 

(polygonum fagopyrum.) 

As if in compensation for the maize it bestowed on the South, 
Northern Europe, at the same time or a little earlier, acquired 
from the interior of Asia a grain hitherto unknown to the civilized 
world, namely, Buckwheat. The fatherland of the dicotyledonous 
plant — for it is not a kind of grass like the other cereals — is North 
China, South Siberia, and the steppes of Turkestan, and it must 
have commenced its migration to the West in company with the 
nations that issued forth of those immeasurable expanses. As 
Piano Carpini, Rubruquis, and above all Marco Polo, forced their 
way, for the first time since there was an historical Europe, to those 
deserts of summer heat and winter ice, and to the barbaric courts 
of small-eyed yellow men \ so in the contrary direction, together 
with the unspeakable harm caused by those terrible races, there 
came some stray habitudes, aptitudes, plants, which might be 
regarded as acquisitions ; these were first introduced to the 
Eastern neighbours of the civilized nations, and then by slow 
advances to those nations themselves. Marco Polo himself, who 
actually saw the true rhubarb in its original home and describes 
that wonderful root, is silent as to buckwheat. But the first 
botanical authors after the beginning of the sixteenth century are 
already acquainted with that grain as introduced from abroad 
within the memory of man. Ruellius writing in 1536, and the 
younger Champier apparently about 1530, speak of " fields in 
France ruddy with Turkish wheat, which came from Greece or 
Asia in the time of our grandfathers ; " this would mean for 
France the latter end of the fifteenth century, and for Germany 



BUCKWHEAT. 3 $ 7 



some fifty years earlier. We are told nothing definite about the 
route by which it came. The name Titrcicum frumentum, early 
replaced by another, ble sarrazin, grano saraceno, only dubiously 
hints at the heathen world beyond Christendom. The names 
used in North and South Germany are different, and therefore 
those regions cannot have got the plant in the same way. The 
Low German name, buch-weizen, was plainly given on the spot, 
and refers to the resemblance of the grains to beech-nuts ; the 
Netherlands boek-weyt passed to North-eastern France in the form 
of bouquette, bucail, etc., and therefore that part of France acquired 
buckwheat from Brabant. The Low German Bibles (of Cologne 
1470, of Lubeck 1494, etc.) use boekwete for the word which 
Luther afterwards translated by spelt, and the High German 
Bibles before Luther by vetch. The oldest mention of the North 
German buckwheat is said to be contained in a register of the 
Mecklenburg bailiwick Gadebusch, of 1436. The other name, 
used in South Germany, heiden-korn (heathen-corn, now commonly 
heide-korn, as if it were corn that grew on heaths), which is already 
found in the second half of the fifteenth century, has the same 
meaning as the Czech pohanka, pohanina, Polish poganka, Magyar 
pohdnka — i.e., corn acquired from the pagans ; but as other Slavs 
of the same part of the world say also aida, haida, haidina, which 
are evidently borrowed from the German, it is doubtful whether 
the Bohemian pohanka be not also heiden-korn translated. A 
third German name tater-korn, tatel-korn means frumeiitum Tatar- 
orum, and has its analogy in the Czech and Little Russian tatarka, 
Magyar tatarka, Finnish tattari, and Esthonian tatri. In this 
word there would lie a clear hint from what nation East Europe 
derived buckwheat, i.e., from the Tartars, by which name was 
understood, not only the true Volga and Crimean Tartars, but also 
the tribes of Mongolian race. But it is strange that the Russians 
are unacquainted with this name, and therefore it seems more 
probable that what was meant was gipsy-corn, as that wandering 
tribe were, and still are in some parts, called Tartars or Heathen, 
and it is very possible that they propagated buckwheat during 
their wanderings in Western Europe, which were very frequent in 
the fifteenth century. The Russian names grecha, grechnkha, 



388 BUCKWHEAT. 



grechikha, etc., also in German dialects griicken, means Greek 
corn, that is, corn from the South, from foreign lands, in the same 
way as the adjective walsch (Italian) is used among the Germans. 
Then there is a name in Russia, in the districts of the Lower 
Volga, dikusha, wild corn — that is, either corn that grows wild, or 
that came from the savages, the nomads on the other side ; besides 
which the Tartar word kurluk is also used. Pallas often saw, 
during his travels, how some of those nomads, in their passing 
attempts at agriculture, planted the Tartar buckwheat, polygonum 
tataricum, and others could not defend their land from it in the 
shape of a weed. Linde, in his dictionary, says that the word and 
plant are not to be found in Polish inventories before the reign of 
Sigismund August, therefore not before the second half of the 
sixteenth century. But the gryka may only have been rarer 
then than afterwards. Taking all in all, it was the Turkish and 
Mongolian races that introduced this new grain into the district 
of the Black Sea, whence (if we leave the gipsies aside) it came 
through maritime commerce via Venice and Antwerp to Germany 
and France, and of course to the Netherlands ; there is no clear 
trace of its having reached the Germans from the Slavs. It was 
recommended by its agreeable taste and short period of growth, 
which last is a confirmation of its origin in the severe North 
Asiatic climate. Now vast Russia, agreeably to its geographical 
and historical situation, is very productive of this corn ; and the 
so-called kasha, 3. pap or pudding of buckwheat flour, is an indis- 
pensable national dish which has not, like so many other things, 
been forced upon the Russians from Europe. 

In North Germany — Holstein, for instance — the common man 
is greatly attached to his groats of buckwheat, which forms an 
important country-article, even in the Netherlands. In the South 
it becomes rarer and rarer, and disappears altogether in the 
Mediterranean countries ; but in the wilder Austrian and Tyrolese 
Alps, where maize will not ripen, one often meets in autumn with 
the pretty fields full of the red stems and white blossom of the 
buckwheat. It is there called plent (from polenta), and the dish 
made of it sterz. 



THE ARABS. 389 



During the above contemplation of many of the single culti- 
vated plants of Asia — the citron and orange, the date-palm, 
saffron, millet, ceratonia siliqua, etc. — it has often been remarked 
that, although their migrations may have already taken place in 
ancient times, they first became a lasting acquisition of the Medi- 
terranean coasts through the Arabs. The Arabs energetically 
took up the work of antiquity, and gave a new and mighty impulse 
to its movement. There was a time when that Midland sea 
might have been called an Arabian lake. It is true that this 
warlike nation did not succeed in taking Constantinople, though 
such an event perhaps would not have been disadvantageous to 
that decayed capital ; and to settle on the Loire, in cold Central 
Europe, was against their nature, and could not have lasted long, 
whatever had been the result of their battle with Charles Martel. 
But Arabs ruled in Egypt and the whole of North Africa, in 
Spain, Sardinia, and the Baleares, in Sicily, Apulia, Calabria, and 
on the coasts of the Levant. There they cultivated the land 
and loaded ships, and in a time of general barbarism, arts and 
polished manners flourished at the brilliant courts of the caliphs 
and their viceroys. Nay, the impulse to transplant the vegetation 
of Asia into Europe was deeper and of more extended influence 
than it ever was under the Romans, whose dominion had reached 
the heart of Asia too. Through the Arabs the Mediterranean 
countries saw Indian products alive and growing, of which the 
fag-end of antiquity had barely heard, or which it had received as 
costly wares at the hands of commerce. It is true it was impos- 
sible to transplant the pepper shrub, and nothing was yet heard 
of coffee ; but the Silkworm was naturalized in Spain and Sicily, 
and Moorish silks from Palermo furnished splendid coronation- 
robes for the imperial Lord of Christendom ; Papyrus thickets 
rustled on the borders of still waters, and Cotton and the Sugar- 
cane tried to thrive in warm places on European soil — the last a 
circumstance of incalculable importance. For, though the culti- 
vation of sugar and cotton could not be carried on to any extent 
in Europe itself, it became the occasion of the immense produc- 
tion of those East Indian plants in the West Indies, of the corre- 
sponding consumption among all the nations of the earth, and of 



390 BUCKWHEAT. 



the world-trade that connects the two, and fills the oceans and 
all seaports with busy life. Whoever now issues from the gate 
of buried Pompeii — on whose roofless walls are seen hastily 
sketched landscapes bearing witness to the successful appropria- 
tion of so many sub-tropical trees even in ancient times — can 
realize by the cotton-fields that lie before him, how the Moorish 
epoch rivals antiquity in this respect. This is proved not only 
by the names zucchero and cotone, but by others derived from the 
Arabic, or introduced by the Arabs, such as melia azedarakh, 
a tree which is propagated on all the coasts of the Mediterranean, 
the lazzeruolo or Azerolia-tree, with edible fruits, and the gesmino l 
gelsomino, the true jasmine, which has almost run wild in the 
above-named region (note 91). 



THE TULIP. 

When the Arabs fell asunder, and gradually went down, the 
maritime commerce of the Italian cities had meanwhile shot up 
during the period of the Crusades : Venice and Genoa ruled the 
markets of the Levant, and conquered islands and territories. 
This connexion with Asia helped to bring into Europe a part of 
the wealth of those favoured Eastern regions ; and when the Turks 
pressed forward as conquerors, even that turned out to the profit 
of universal cultivation. For the Turks were not a merely 
destructive nation like the Mongols ; they provided Europe with 
much that was new and unheard-of from the treasures of their 
native home, which enlarged the limits of custom and the circle 
of ideas. They were lovers of trees, and especially of flowers. 
During the short fierce summers of Turkestan, innumerable 
flowers of gorgeous hue bloom on dry heaths, which are exposed 
almost uninterruptedly to the rays of the sun ; and the Turk, even 
after his migration to the South-West, desired to see his favourites 
in his garden, and added to them other plants unknown before 
from the many lands united under his dominion. Thus Stamboul 
and the Turkish Empire in general became the storehouse of a 
new and splendid garden-flora, which migrated to Europe by two 
main roads, those of Vienna and Venice. Of these Turkish 
flowers the most celebrated, and most remarkable on account of 
its further destinies, was the titlipano^ so named in Italy after the 
Persian dulbend, turban ; the wonder and admiration of the then 
still very naive children of the West. The history of this gay, 
showy, and most variable bulbous plant has been told by J. Beck- 
mann with his usual thoroughness in his " Beitrage." Conrad 
Gesner, the Linnaeus of the sixteenth century, saw his first tulip in 



392 THE TULIP. 



the garden of an Augsburg patrician in 1559 ; and we also hear of 
tulips blooming in the garden of the rich Fugger family in 1565. 
The seed of the first-named plant came, some say, from Constan- 
tinople, others from Cappadocia ; according to Clusius, Kaffa in 
the Crimea was its home ; that is, the Crimean Tartars, kinsmen 
of the Turks, having brought the plant with them and propagated 
it, supplied the bulbs ; while the Italians independently imported 
another kind, and called it tulipano. The Imperial Ambassador 
Busbeck, who occupied himself much with this flower, is said to 
have brought the first German tulip to Prague. From Vienna the 
tulip reached Northern Europe, and especially England ; but the 
flower found its most ardent lovers among the free, rich, and 
unimaginative Dutch. In Holland there sprang up a rivalry in 
producing new, rare, and curious varieties, which finally led to 
the famous tulip-swindle in the first half of the seventeenth cen- 
tury, the buying and selling of samples that had never existed, a 
bubble-trade that was the model of the scenes enacted on the 
Paris Exchange a century later, and of modern speculations. His- 
tory does not say whether it was even then speculative Children 
of Israel that paid the price of a house or estate for a fancy-tulip, 
and whether they were in the end the only winners, while all the 
other gamesters found their imagined riches melting away in their 
hand. Other flowers and ornamental plants that Europe owes to 
the Crescent are the now universally propagated, sweet-scented 
lilac, Syringa vulgaris, Ital. and Span. lilac, French Mas (an 
Oriental name), which Busbequius brought from Stamboul ; the 
Hibiscus Syriacus with its splendid rose-like flowers ; the aromatic 
Oriental hyacinth, Hyacinthus Oriental's, brought from Bagdad 
and Aleppo to Venice and Italy, which afterwards became a rival 
to the tulip in Dutch gardens, and like it was produced in innu- 
merable colours and varieties ; the crown-imperial, Fritillaria 
imperialis, a Persian flower with which Europeans became 
acquainted in the gardens of Constantinople ; the garden-ranun- 
culus, Ranunculus Asiaticus, the favourite flower of Mohammed 
the Fourth, who collected every variety of it, from all the pro- 
vinces of his wide realm, in the gardens of his capital, whence 
it spread to Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands. A passion 



THE TURKS. 393 



for flowers having been once aroused, others from different coun- 
tries were added to the above, and other Turkish flowers — for 
instance, the beautiful balsamine, impatiens Balsamina, brought 
by the Portuguese from the East Indies in the sixteenth century, 
and still blooming everywhere in Italy ; and the carnation or gilli- 
flower (Ital. garofolo, garo/ano, French ceillet, little eye), the 
dianthus caryophyllus^ the flower of the Italian Renaissance — for at 
the epoch of the revival of cities and commerce, it had been found 
growing wild in South Italy, and art and care enticed from it an 
increase of scent and leaves, and all shades of colour. It is still — 

Im schonen Kreis der Blatter Drang 
Und Wohlgeruch das Leben lang 
Und a lie tans end Farben — 

the favourite of the Transalpine nations, though the ancients never 
noticed it. — That trees as well as flowers were spread through the 
world by the Turks, is proved by the already mentioned beautiful 
Horse-chestnut, with its pyramidal blossoms, and early mass of 
foliage ; the Cherry-bay, brought from Trebizond to Vienna by 
Clusius in the second half of the sixteenth century ; and, finally, 
the charming, delicate, sweet-scented Albizzia Julibrissin, whose 
Italian name gaggia di Costantinopoli betrays at what point it 
first touched Europe. — Of cereals, we have already mentioned 
Buckwheat as a Turkish-Mongolian grain from Upper Asia. 



AMERICA. 

Bur what mattered these belated arrivals from the East, in 
comparison with the enormous exchange that began with the 
Discovery of America? "America," says Kohl, very finely, 
"emerged like a new star attached to our planet." What the 
tropic and temperate zones of America had to bestow was no 
mere supplement that had been accidentally neglected by 
Phoenicians, Iranians, Greeks, and Romans, but the gifts and 
produce of quite a new world. Then commenced the second 
great period of history, that of the connexion of both hemis- 
pheres, for the first period had only been the development of one 
hemisphere within itself. We are still at the beginning of this 
epoch, inaugurated by the great Genoese discoverer; and trans- 
plantation and acclimatization have hitherto been only accidental 
accompaniments of commerce and navigation. And yet every 
walk we take through European parks and gardens, every drive 
on the roads and railways, already leads us past some American 
plants : the vitis Labrusca, the so-called " wild vine" (Virginia 
creeper) from North America, covers columns and walls with its 
crimsoned autumn leaves, though it yields no grape-juice like its 
Eastern sister from the Caucasus and Demavend; beside it 
climbs the bright yellow blossom of the Tropceolum majus ; the 
pyramidal poplar, Populus dilatata, stretches like a green colon- 
nade, in single or double file, along our highways (a native of the 
Mississippi, but brought to us by way of Italy, and therefore mis- 
called " Lombardy poplar ") — the only regular-shaped tree in the 
North, and therefore despised by the romantic and sentimental 
school ; the American plane-tree, Platanus occidentalism throws a 
thick broad shade; hedges of North American acacias, the 



AMERICA. 395 



Robinia pseudacacia, surround the public gardens, in which the 
spectator finds the Finns Strobus, the Weymouth pine ; the 
Bignonia Catalpa ; the tulip-tree, Liriodendron tnlipiferum ; the 
magnificent Magnolia grandiflora, now universally propagated 
south of the Alps ; the sweet violet-scented Acacia Farnesia?ia 
from tropical America ; the Australian Eucalyptus globulus, with 
which the Roman Campagna is being planted; the Japanese 
Ligusta-tree ; the beautiful Japanese medlar, Eriobothrya Japonica, 
with its fragrant blossoms in autumn, and golden bunches of fruit 
in spring, which is now an important cultivated plant in South 
Italy and Sicily; the delicate pepper-tree, Schinus molle ; the 
splendid coral-tree, Erythrina corallodendron, and many others. 
In return for wheat, cattle, and horses — Eastern gifts of in- 
calculable worth — we have received the Turkey-cock, maize, 
potato, and the Opuntian cactus, or Indian fig, opuntiaficus Indica. 
Everybody knows what the potato is to the North — and this also 
came to us through Italy, as the name kartorTel (tartufo) proves ; 
but it is not so widely understood that the Indian fig is almost as 
important to the waste lands and rocks of the Mediterranean as 
that tuber to the heaths of the North. On all the coasts of the 
South, from the Atlas mountains and the Sierra Morena past 
Etna, to the Taurus and Sinai, this bluish-green, prickly plant of 
South America, producing in its strange vegetation one fleshy 
leaf at the end of another, has covered the driest and barrenest 
cliffs and shelves of rock, and restored them to cultivation by 
humus soil. This cactus is planted in the lava fields of Etna, 
and the neighbourhood of Naples, to make them more quickly 
susceptible of cultivation; hedges of the spine-covered plant 
protect the fields and orchards; the leaves nourish cattle and 
goats, and the juicy fruit forms the nourishment and refreshment 
of the population during the late autumn and winter months. 
Beside it grows its companion and physiognomical relative, the 
Aloe, Agave Americana, with its enormous rosette of leaves, out 
of which springs a tall flower stalk, like a tree or chandelier ; the 
two plants together have gone far to complete the type of the 
Mediterranean landscape, which had long before received its sober, 
quiet colouring from the East, by adding a new and perfectly 



396 AMERICA, 



harmonious element. The potato has not become a favourite 
among the Southerners (note 92), like the tomato, another 
American fruit akin to the potato, and originally poisonous, the 
Solatium Ly coper sicum, called in Italy pomi d'oro, which is used 
whenever it can be, in the Italian kitchen. 

That some shade may not be wanting to the picture of inter- 
change with the New World, we have yet to mention Tobacco. As 
the Europeans not only carried the beneficial results of three 
thousand years of culture to the virgin land across the Atlantic, 
but landed negroes and Jesuits in the South, and brandy and 
small-pox in the North; so we owe to America not only the 
potato and precious metals, and the example of republican free- 
dom, but also the poisonous narcotic plant, which it now seems 
impossible to extirpate. That a barbaric custom of drawing 
into the mouth through a tube and again expelling the smoke of 
the dried leaves of a stupefying plant, of stuffing the same leaves 
when powdered into the nose, could ever have been adopted from 
the Redskins by white, yellow, and black races all over the world, 
and become so deeply rooted among them, is a fact that gives one 
much to think about. As the pauper and the criminal in Europe 
beg a small piece of money to buy tobacco with, so the traveller 
or the merchant cannot more easily win the favour of a negro in 
the heart of Africa, of a Samoyed, a Malay, etc., than by the gift 
of a handful of tobacco. Turks, Arabs, and Persians sit still and 
puff the smoke of this weed : a picture of their own useless, 
apathetic, dreamy lives (note 93). During these two centuries 
hundreds of millions have been spent on this nasty habit ; sums, 
which, if accumulated, or productively laid out, might have made 
all the nations wealthy ; and even now many a thousand acres of 
valuable land, which might grow wheat or wine, are planted with this 
species of noxious night-shade. Perhaps the coming centuries 
will furnish more examples of the kind. For as the Hellenes, 
*he aristocracy of mankind, were surrounded by barbarians — by 
superstitious Egyptians, slavish Asiatics, drunken Thracians, and 
the like — so the European hitherto lives encompassed by inferior, 
coloured races. The traffic that is more and more tightly be- 
girdling the earth will bring the white man into ever-closer 



TOBACCO. 397 



contact and community with those masses, and their crossing may 
be the parent of many a monstrous progeny. Even then the 
ennobling process of humanity will go on, and that immense 
problem too be solved ; but who can tell in what long periods, 
through what intervals of barbarism, at the expense of what 
sacrifices, retrogressions, and ruins ! 



CONCLUSION. 

In more than one iespect — apart from the errors of omission 
which the author may have committed, and for the consequences 
of which he must be responsible— the above sketches bear a 
fragmentary and isolated character. For agriculture, horticulture, 
and domestic economy are only parts of a whole, a mere extract 
from the history of human culture which accomplishes itself in 
every part at once. Nevertheless the universal is mirrored back 
in the particular ; and as cultivated plants migrated from nation 
to nation, from East to West, from South to North, so migrated 
in the same direction, and at the same time, freedom and culture 
in every shape. Our field-fruits and tree-fruits come from India 
and Persia, from Syria and Armenia ; and so do our fairy tales 
and legends, our religious systems, all primitive inventions, and 
fundamental technical arts. Greece and Italy furnished us with 
the nourishing and useful plants with which we surround our 
dwellings in Central and Northern Europe ; and in the same 
succession, those classic lands taught us nobler customs, deeper 
thought, ideal arts, human aims, and the higher forms of political 
and social fellowship. What is proved by the history of plants, 
would not be otherwise expressed by the history of cultivation in 
a wider sense. The last, also, is only a history of intercourse, and 
as the individual man can only fulfil his destiny, i.e., the highest 
development of his powers, in society, so nations, in proportion 
as they rise in culture, are but the pupils and heirs of other and 
superior nations that live round them. Therefore at all times the 
greatest patriotism has been exhibited, not by those national 
leaders who clung the most obstinately to native peculiarities, but 
by those who the most frankly and readily accepted foreign 



CONCLUSION. 399 



teachings, and conquests of culture achieved in other lands and 
earlier times. 

This book contains a number of monographic sketches of the 
manner in which plants and domestic animals passed from hand to 
hand ; it would be another task, completing the first, to ascertain 
which of its own wild native plants the West has reclaimed and 
improved in the same way, whether spontaneously or following 
the example of the East and South. A few instances of it have 
been pointed out in passing, the rest must be left for a ' separate 
examination. Thus, no doubt, the cabbage, now one of the 
commonest and most useful of vegetables, grows, or did grow, 
wild in Europe ; but when and where did men begin to plant it 
in gardens, to transform it and make it more agreeable, and to 
produce countless varieties, each finer and better liked than the 
preceding, and farther removed from the parent type? Much 
relating to this is scattered in an immeasurable literature ; much 
must remain obscure ; something is taught by the names now in 
use, or which were formerly common. Where the Savoy and 
Wirsing (crisped cabbage) came from is indicated in these names, 
for the last is simply the green cabbage, verza, of Upper Italy. 
That Italy first taught the Germans to plant and eat any cabbage 
at all is shown by the name "kohl," from Latin caulis ; also by 
"kabes," Slavic kapus, kapnsta, from caputium and capnccio. The 
rape-cole, " kohl-rabi," and rape-seed, "raps, riibsen," are named 
after the Latin caulorapa, caulis rapi, and rapicium^ and are 
of recent date in Germany ; the delicate and curiously shaped 
cauliflower is of Eastern origin, and came to Europe via Venice 
and Antwerp, to Germany only just before the Thirty Years' War; 
Sauer-krant seems to be a Tartar invention adopted by the Slavs, 
which spread from these to Germany. Like the cabbage, the 
artichoke was a native of Europe, and is an improved thistle ; the 
turnip and carrot, daucus carota, are also European plants. Though 
the apple-tree may have originally grown wild in our woods, the 
noble fruit-trees of our gardens are not directly its descendants, 
but are derived from slips brought from beyond the Alps and 
grafted on the native tree — an emblem of many similar and now 
obscure titles of possession in the intellectual province (note 



400 CONCLUSION. 



94). On the whole, there is but little of what Europe naturally 
possessed, that she has spontaneously raised from a wild con- 
dition and made useful by cultivation ; she had to be prompted 
to it, on the Mediterranean coasts by Asia, and in Central Europe 
by the South, where all the sources of our culture lie. 

For centuries, nay, for thousands of years, the cultivated plants 
have lived with mankind under artificial conditions ; it remains to 
be asked, How far their nature has been altered thereby ? Man, 
by partial choice, and calculating care, produces an accumulation 
of certain organic tendencies and aberrations; thence proceed 
varieties, which in turn produce others; when the intermediate 
links have been dropt, as less susceptible of culture, we are 
puzzled to recognise in the garden-plant the wilding from which 
it was derived. This is a subject which now considerably occupies 
the naturalist and in its treatment it would be of use to him to 
have a wider acquaintance with the history, language, and litera- 
ture of the ancients, of their pictorial and sculptural remains, etc. 
The question seems of still more significance when applied to 
domestic animals. But as this part of our subject, since Darwin, 
has become the daily theme of naturalists, we will limit ourselves 
to the following remarks on the connexion of the physiological 
problem with the history of man. 

It is, we think, an indisputable fact that not only native but 
individually acquired characteristics are inheritable; in other 
words, that the fates and experiences of earlier generations be- 
come, in later generations, fixed natural tendencies. What the 
forefathers had once learned, often against their will, appears 
innate in their progeny ; and what was there a result is here a 
point of departure. And the longer any condition prevailed 
among the parents by force of circumstances, the more certainly 
it appears as an instinct in the grandchildren. Mental move- 
ments produce bodily changes; and while the latter are trans- 
mitted to the progeny, they of necessity reproduce the former, 
which are then forthcoming as intellectual tendency, born endow- 
ment, racial characteristic, and innate skill. What we call history is 
nothing but this slow physico-mental transformation of the younger 
generations through the impressions received by elder ones ; and 



CONCLUSION. 401 



the so-called Spirit of the Age is nothing but a general sense, 
working unconsciously in the children, of the experiences endured 
by their ancestors. If — on occasion of some sudden and seemingly 
unaccountable new historical epoch, whose unexpected outbreak 
and wealth of ideas surprise us — we could survey the quiet pre- 
paration that has been going on in the generations immediately 
preceding, all wonder would cease. Because of the slowness of 
physiological metamorphosis, a sudden leap has at no time and 
in no nation been possible. Should a race be suddenly plunged, 
by a historical " constellation," amidst a civilization of which their 
earlier fortunes have not rendered them capable, there inevitably 
ensues a chaos of superficial culture, relapses, incongruous im- 
pulses, barbaric subtlety, coarseness, and decay ; until, after 
centuries of a stormy process, everything at last finds its equili- 
brium. This was, for example, the case with the Germans on 
Roman soil : they, who had scarcely yet adopted the beginnings 
of agriculture, were obliged to live in walled towns, to submit to 
a system of law adjusted to the most complicated relations of 
life and the most refined necessities, and to feel at home in the 
subtle distinctions of church dogma and the symbolic old Oriental 
pomp of ritual ! While before they had delighted for a thousand 
years in warlike marches, and been contented in the silence of 
their forests with an entirely primitive w T orship of nature, not ex- 
clusive of cruel sacrifices, another thousand years of a new life was 
necessary before new nerves, muscle-fibres, brain-fibres, and diffe- 
rently constituted blood-atoms, and, with these, other mental 
emotions, could take the place ot the bodily conformation of 
that first period, and the inclinations rooted therein. 

Therefore we cannot sufficiently estimate the slowness and 
difficulty of the transition from a wandering hunter's-life to the 
taming and tending of cattle, nor of that from nomadic freedom 
to a settled domicile. Necessity must have been very pressing be- 
fore the Shepherd could resolve to dig up his pasture-land, to sow 
grain, to wait for its growing, to hoard up the harvest for a whole 
year, and so tie himself down to one spot like a prisoner and a 
slave. As soon as the outward pressure was removed, he obeyed the 
voice within, and returned, like a liberated captive, to his former 

26 



4 02 CONCLUSION. 

roving life. In the same way the Hunter felt cattle-breeding a kind 
of slavery. Armed with bow and arrow, his ashen shaft tipt with the 
sharpened stone, he freely roamed the woods, and the preparation 
of those weapons was his only care and occupation. If he had 
the luck to kill a wild bull, he could feast for days together. What 
a series of tiresome, hampering, humdrum arrangements would be 
necessary to catch that same bull or wild-cow, shut it up, accustom 
it to obev and follow, bring up the calf, watch the herd at the 
pasture, and persuade the cow to let herself be milked ! Be- 
fore all this would be submitted to, hunting must have become 
unprofitable, and escape in any direction impossible. And the 
moment a refuge presented itself, a relapse into the free life was 
inevitable (note 95). But the longer the new life was forcibly 
maintained, the more it became natural ; in the grandchildren's 
grandchildren the old instinct of freedom began to decline, and 
a feeling for civilization took root. 

That all this is not mere fancy, but really happened, and is 
happening still, can be distinctly observed in animals. In them 
also the Experience of ancestors becomes Instinct in the progeny. 
Grazing cattle will not touch plants that would be deadly or 
hurtful to them ; but if taken to a distant land, to another 
continent where unknown herbs grow, they are unable to dis- 
tinguish, they sicken or die of the poison they have eaten. Birds 
have an instinctive dread of the bird of prey that pursues them, 
because former generations have been persecuted by the same 
enemy, and some individuals have escaped it Where man makes 
war upon birds, they are extremely shy of him ; but where from 
any cause he spares them, they are familiar and bold, even without 
individual experience, and without the example of parents. Dogs 
that for ages have been trained to a particular kind of chase are 
born with a decided bent for just that chase ; young sheep-dogs, 
whose forefathers have been used to watching flocks for centuries, 
bring into the world with them an unmistakable aptitude and 
inclination for the office of guardian. Where oxen have not 
been used as draught-cattle, it is a hard matter to yoke the young, 
and the reverse in the contrary case. So cows, whose female 
ancestors have not been milked, are very difficult to keep still 



CONCLUSION. 403 



at milking-time. We have already seen that the domestic pigeon 
became so entirely tame, because it had been for centuries a 
sacred bird whom no one molested; the cock, because it was 
dedicated to the God of Day by the Persians, British Celts, Slavs, 
Hungarians, etc. ; and the cat, because Egyptian superstition, 
combined with Egyptian patience, had for long periods spared 
and cherished that shy beast of prey. The summed-up expe- 
riences of all the single individuals became at last a change of 
nature. 

The application of all this to man follows naturally. In him 
also the process of humanizing is a slow work of time, and here 
too the success is only sure when the same favourable influences 
have been long at work. A thousand years of slavery, for in- 
stance, are not to be wiped out by one Act of Emancipation ; a 
race accustomed to other conditions of life cannot be made a 
member of the civilized family overnight by the promulgation of 
European laws. The greater the original difference, the longer 
must be the necessary series of generations, and the quiet work 
of change — so long that one is often inclined to doubt the 
possibility of the task being accomplished. To introduce the 
code Napoleon among some barbarous or semi-barbarous race, to 
give the soldiers European uniforms and drill-sergeants, to lay 
down gas-pipes, run a railway through the country, and set 
European officials to superintend them, to forward diplomatic 
notes in French, written by a European secretary behind the 
scenes — all this is as easy as putting any other varnish on, but 
only the crude, vague notions of the crowd will consider it any 
great gain. More likely, as it disturbs quiet growth from within 
and from below, the only result would be everlasting impotence. 

We have seen how the flora of the Italian peninsula has in 
the course of history acquired more and more of the southern 
character. When the first Greeks landed in South Italy, the 
woods still consisted mainly of deciduous trees; the beeches 
grew at a lower level than now, when they are confined to the 
highest mountain regions. Some centuries later we see in the 
landscapes of the Pompeian frescoes nothing but evergreen trees, 
the laurus nobilis, the olive, cypress, and oleander; under the 



4 04 CONCLUSION. 



latest emperors, and in the Middle Ages, the lemon and orange 
trees make their appearance ; and after the discovery of America 
the magnolia, agave, and Indian fig. There can be no doubt that 
this transformation was chiefly brought about by the hand of man ; 
but did not — in countries like the South European peninsulas, 
where two types of vegetation, the subtropical and evergreen, and 
that of the temperate zone, met together — did not the tendency 
and impulse of Nature itself assist the efforts of man ? Did not 
those more southern plants, with leathery leaves, strong bark, and 
manifold armour, win the victory in the struggle for existence by 
their tougher vitality, i.e., did they not gradually press forward to 
where, first the Apennines, and then the Alps, form a rampart 
against the present flora of the Mediterranean ? Germany, 
France, and England have also considerably changed in a southern 
sense within historic times ; but the two or three thousand years 
over which our historical knowledge extends furnish no evidence 
of a reverse process, namely, that northern cultivated plants have 
ever crossed the mountains, and spread over Northern and then 
over Southern Italy. Is it not just the same with Man, and does 
not the dark-haired always conquer the blonde ? Does it not lie 
in the nature of the latter to approximate the former ? We have 
no direct means of knowing what was the complexion of the 
primitive Indo-Germanic people. At the epoch when we become 
acquainted with it, it has long been split into branches, the colour 
of whose hair, skin, and eyes shows two different types. Asiatics, 
Greeks, and Romans are dark, Celts and Germans fair-haired, 
blue-eyed, and of light complexion ; the former are at the same 
time of shorter, slighter build, with lively gestures, expert, 
sagacious, brown dwarfs, the Celts and Germans tall, red-cheeked 
giants, with flowing hair (note 96). Fair hair seemed to the 
Greek, as it does now to the southerner, particularly beautiful and 
noble, and he loved to bestow it on his ideal heroes and 
goddesses. In Eastern Europe, north of Greece, the scene of an 
early mixture of nations, we do now and then find a blonde or 
reddish complexion dwelt upon, but nothing like so decidedly as 
in the West. Herodotus describes the Budini as fair, but rather 
by way of distinction from the other tribes. Later, Procopius 



CONCLUSION. 405 



speaks of the Slavs as neither dark nor fair, but inclining to 
a light complexion; while Ammianus gives the Iranian Alani 
moderately fair hair. The hair of the Thracians and Scythians 
was distinguished from that of the Greeks by a lighter hue, and 
this accounts for their being sometimes expressly described as 
white, ruddy, and soft haired, but in most cases their essential 
similarity to the Greeks is tacitly taken for granted. On the other 
hand, the Egyptians are considered particularly dark, and also 
woolly-haired, therefore approaching to the negro type ; likewise the 
Colchians (pre-Semitic aborigines) ; — so that we have to imagine 
the Greeks themselves as of a warm southern tint, but by no means 
very black. But in which of these two types, the dark or the 
light, may we with the greater probability recognise a faithful 
copy of the primitive time ? Everything is in favour of the 
presumption, that that race which in its historic isolation had 
departed least from the original manner of life, namely, the 
northern race, had also most faithfully preserved the physical 
signs of the parent type. Wherever, in later times, they have 
approached the southern nature and form of life, or mixed with 
the darker race, there the latter have always gained the upper 
hand. The Gauls of the later Roman period are already less fair 
than the Germans ; so that they have to dye themselves to be 
able to represent German captives in Caligula's triumphal pro- 
cession ; while their kinsmen in the British Islands, the Cale- 
donians, are still so red-haired and long-limbed, that Tacitus is 
inclined to class them as Germans. Through the whole of Gaul, 
the northern type, in contact with the Romans, passed over into 
the Italian type ; who would recognise in the nervous, sinewy, 
brown, active, under-sized inhabitant of modern France, the tall, 
raw-boned Albino nature of the ancient Celts, who, as Cassar 
remarks, despised the Roman for his small size ? The inhabitants 
of South Germany, i.e., the districts along the Alpine slopes, the 
Danube, the Upper Rhine, and even the Maine, etc., have at 
least chestnut coloured hair, and are akin to the Romance type ; in 
North Germany, on the North Sea and Baltic, it is far from being 
everybody that resembles now the picture drawn of them by the 
Romans. Goethe, whom we like to think of as the archegetes of 



4 o6 CONCLUSION. 



his nation, had brown eyes and brown hair, and his copy, Wilhelm 
Meister, was not fair; Dorothea, the beloved of Herrmann, had 
black eyes — it is true she came from the borders of France. 
In mixed marriages, as those of Jews or Greeks with Germans, 
we see in the habitus of the progeny the greater energy of the 
southern complexion, the lesser power of resistance of the 
northern. No wonder that so little of the Goths, Longobards, etc % 
in Italy, of the Franks, Burgundians, and Visigoths in France 
and Spain, is now to be seen in the external appearance of men. 
The Wallachians, an outcome of the most confused mixture of 
north and south, are a very dark-haired, brown-coloured race. 
Whether in these, as in many other cases that we have over- 
looked, it is more the food, therefore the assimilation of matter, 
or the more civilized customs, or, lastly, the mixing of races, that 
has caused this change of complexion — in any case, the process is 
analogous to that other, by which, from the most ancient times, 
partly by natural ways, but mainly and indisputably by that of 
human culture, the vegetable forms of the South-east pressed 
forward into the West and North, and there created a different, 
an evergreen, more ideal landscape, and gave to the groups and 
figures in human settlements other, brighter, distincter, and purer 
outlines. 



NOTES. 



Note i, pagf, 31. 

The Yew {taxus baccata) was already shunned as poisonous in ancient 
times, and was believed to be a demonic tree dedicated to the gods of 
death. Catuvolcus, a king of the Eburones, being in a desperate 
condition, killed himself with taxus poison. During the Middle Ages 
the yew was planted in graveyards, and as the tree is also distinguished 
by an extraordinarily long life, splendid examples are still to be met 
with in such places, especially in England and Ireland. Caesar, in 
speaking of Catuvolcus, says that the yew was very abundant in Cen- 
tral Europe ; but the beauty of its wood, which was as valuable to 
turners and carvers as box became afterwards, led to whole districts 
being stript of it. In ancient times it was used for making bows so 
exclusively that, for example, its Old Norse name $r,yr, also means a 
bow (just as Homer's melia, an ash, is also a lance) ; and the K-rune 
has the shape of a bow. So the Greek toxon, a bow, is nearly 
related to the Latin taxus and Slav. tisH t the yew ; and these words 
fall into their places in the large word-family, No. 235 in Curtius. 
Taxuswzs the material for the wood-carver, as the Gothic thaho^argilla, 
for the moulder in clay ; and each might have been called Tychios as 
well as he who in the Iliad makes Ajax's shield of seven ox hides ; or 
even Teukros, who, though not a master-workman, always hits upon 
the right thing. — Another interesting name for the yew runs through 
the series of nations from West to East, but so that it gradually dies 
out in the latter direction with the tree itself. Old Ir. eo (—zvus, as 
beo=vivus), Cymr. yw, Corn, hiven, Bret, ivin — in extended form Old 
Ir. ibhar, ibar, yubar, which last still means both yew and bow, and, 
according to Zeuss, is the root of the tribe-name Eburones — Span, 
and Port. zva y Fr. if t Mid.-Lat. ivus, Old High Germ, iva, iga, A. S. 
iw, edit}, Engl, yew, Dan. ibe, Swed. id, Old Pruss. znvzs, yew ; but 
Lhh.yeva and Lett, eva, lazy-tree, Slav, zva, willow. In Lithuanian 



4 o8 AOTES. 



the yew is called eglus or og/us, which is like the Slav, yell, y2la, fir. 
In the homeland of the Slavs, between the sources of the Dnieper 
and Volga, the taxus tree grew no longer (nor the beech, and for the 
same reason the Finns have formed their tatnmi, oak, out of the Slav. 
dabii, oak, or the German timbr) ; and so in their language the names 
iva and tisii, tisa, etc., have come to mean the sallow and pine 
But commerce very early conveyed yew-wood, and buckets, bows, 
etc., of yew from the Rhine country to the Baltic, where the tree was 
scarcer, and thence to the Aists (Esths) and Wends, where it alto- 
gether ceased. — That horn-bows were used as well as those of yew, 
we have evidence from early antiquity and the distant East. In the 
Odyssey Ulysses turns his bow about to see if during his long absence 
the worms have not bored through the horn ; and in the Iliad Pan- 
darus the Trojan possesses a bow which the keraoxoos tekton has 
made for him out of the horns of a wild goat. The Hungarians, on 
their appearance in the West, are also described as being armed with 
horn-bows ; sitting on their swift steeds and gnashing their teeth, they 
shot from these bows their well-aimed and poisoned arrows. In the 
Kibelungen-Lied one of Etzel's men is significantly called Hornboge, 
horn-bow. 

Note 2, page 31. 

To this very day the carts of the Nogais, the so-called arbas, 
give us a picture of these ancient waggons. The wheels and axle 
turn together, and as they are never greased, they cause a frightful 
screeching that is heard far over the steppes. The Nogais are 
proud of this noise and say, " We are no thieves ; we can be 
heard from afar" (J. von Blaramberg, Erinnerungen, vol. i. p. 
101. Berlin, 1872). Similar waggons, whose ancient origin is 
evident, exist elsewhere. When the Austrians marched into Bosnia 
in the autumn of 1878 an eye-witness wrote : " No Bosnian peasant 
has a cart in which even an ounce of iron is to be found. Wheels, 
axles, nails, are all of wood. A tire or clamp is a thing unknown ; a 
Bosnian waggon with six horses makes a screeching that goes through 
one half a mile away. It has never entered a Bosnian's head to 
grease a cart-wheel." It is certain that the waggons of the Cimbri at 
Verona in the year 101 B.C. exactly resembled these Bosnian carts. 

Note 3, page 31. 

The sheep has been a domestic animal from time immemorial, but 
the art of shearing it was unknown to primitive nations ; the wool 
was plucked out by hand. Even in our nineteenth century C. J. 



AO'JES. 409 



Graba found this custom practised in the distant Faroe Isles ("Journal 
of a Voyage to Faroe in 1828." Hamburg, 1830). After circumstan- 
tially describing the process, the author continues : " It looks more 
cruel than it really is, for only the wool that is near falling of its own 
accord is torn off; the rest is left and taken a fortnight later." In 
Italy this plucking of wool was still practised in some places as late 
as the date of Varro and Pliny. Pliny, 8, 73 : " Oves non ubique 
tondentur, durat quibusdam in locis vellendi mos ; " according to Varro, 
De r. r., 2, 11, 9, those who stuck to the older method kept the animals 
fasting for three days, so that the wool might come out more easily. 
Varro can even fix the date when the first shearers (and shears, of 
course) came from Sicily to Italy, 2, 11, 10: " Omm' no tonsores in 
Italia privium venisse ex Sicilia dicunt post R. c. a. CCCCLIIII y ut 
scrip turn in publico Ardece in Uteris extat, eosgue adduxisse P. 
Ticinium Menam" They came from Sicily ; that is, in this case also, 
Greeks were the teachers. From a passage on the subject in Homer 
it may appear doubtful whether in the epic period sheep were shorn, 
or the wool was still plucked out. Iliad, 12, 451 : 

d)Q d' OTi. TtOl\li\V paid <pkpu 7TOK0V dodtVOg o'lOQ^ 

Xeijof \afiojv trepy, oXiyov ok fiiv &x$og i7reiyei. 

That is, Hector lifted the heavy stone as easily as the shepherd — 
either the sheared fleece or the bundle of plucked-out wool. But the 
word ttoicoq is in favour of the latter meaning. IloKog, as well as the 
verb iruKi.iv in Hesiod, Op. et D. f 775, dig Trckav, and in Theocritus, 5, 
98: 

dXX' iyoj ig yXdXvav [ActXaicbv 7tokov, oTnroKa Tzt%d 
tclv olv tuv 7reXAav, Kpartdq, duprjaofUXL avrog — 

is the specific expression for carpere lanam, in contrast to Ktipeiv, 
icapiivcti, to shear, to cut off. In the Odyssey, 18, 314, Ulysses calls to 
the maids : " Go into the house to your mistress and entertain her ; 
sit by her and turn the spindle or pluck the wool with your hands : ?) 
e'lpia 7thk67-£ x E P aiv — pulling and plucking is very similar to combing 
(7TEKTELV, pectere, pecten), which has nothing to do with shearing. This 
primitive meaning of ttskelv is well confirmed by the identical Lithu- 
anian verb, ptszti (sz=k), which still means to pull, to tear. In the 
same way the Slavic runo, fleece, is formed from riivati, to pluck. 
Varro, who frequently recurs to the subject, thinks it indubitable that 
vellus, fleece, was also derived from vellere, to pluck. Modern exposi- 
tors, like Corssen, separate the two words, connecting vellus with 'ipwv, 
ovXog, and vellere with the Gothic vilvan, to rob (properly rend). 
Varro, De I. /., 5, 8, also quotes the opinion that the Velia, the next hill 



4 io NOTES. 



to the Palatine, was called so froirr the Palatine shepherds plucking 
the wool off their sheep in that place ; from which we at least gather 
that those earliest shepherds were not thought to have used the shears. 
— It was the case with sheep's wool as with the human hair in time of 
mourning. To tear out the hair when in affliction was natural to the 
passionate gestures of the South and of antiquity ; and Homer, in such 
cases, uses the verb riWuv, HWiaSrai, which expresses the action of 
tearing out. In later times, when a man's hair was no longer his pride, 
and mourners shaved their heads and beards, the custom was a mere 
form ; and so, in other parts of the epic and in later poetical speech, 
another word, Kelpeiv, KupeaSai, is used. — We do not know exactly how 
early the custom of shearing was practised in the East ; at any rate, 
it was earlier than in Greece. As " the sheep-shearing " is spoken of 
as a country feast in the oldest portions of the Bible, modern com- 
mentators have supposed that a general shearing took place at a fixed 
time. But there is not much force in the argument. It must be 
remembered that the flocks of the patriarchs were not kept merely or 
mainly for the sake of the wool ; that the sheep, besides the use of 
their milk, were principally destined to be killed and eaten, and their 
skins to be used for clothing and bedding. 



Note 4, page 31. 

See Hehn's treatise, Das Salz. Eine Kulturhistorische Studie, 
Berlin, 1873. Still more copious is the book by M. J. Schleiden, Das 
Salz. Seine Geschichte, seine Symbolik und seine Bedeutung im 
Menschenleben. Eine Monographische Skizze, Leipzig, 1875, which 
attempts to handle the subject from all points of view. This oppor- 
tunity is used to add a few notes to the first-mentioned study. 

According to an essay by R. Ludwig, in the Archiv fur Hessische 
Geschichte und Alter •thumskunde, vol. xi. p. 46 sea., Darmstadt, 1867, 
the bathing-place Nauheim, between Frankfort and Giessen, was 
an old Celtic salt mine. In that place, besides Celtic coins and 
bronze vessels, there have been found earthenware vessels for making 
salt. To what Celtic nation did this salt-pit belong ? Perhaps to the 
Boii, for though Helvetians of the early time may have dwelt near the 
Main, they can hardly have crossed that river. Or was there here, in 
the Germanic land, a salt work carried on by Celts under compulsion 
or for hire ? To refer the name of the 'AXawoL used by Ptolemy to 
the Celtic word haloin, as we have done in agreement with Zeuss, is 
hazardous, because the change of s into h is only found sporadically 
in early times, and first becomes general towards the end of the 
Roman Empire. But in the name of the Celtic Salassi, who dwelt in 



NOTES. 411 



the highest Alps, there may well be contained the idea of salt, in 
which case the account of these people by Appian, Illyr., 17, would 
contain a legendary motive that had some sort of connection with the 
name. We are told that they had been obliged to submit to the 
Romans because they had no salt. Afterwards, when they revolted, 
they stored up a quantity of salt in their mountains for purposes of 
defence. My conjecture on page 49 of the treatise on salt, about the 
origin of the name Heilsbronn, has been refuted in Zeitschrift fur 
deutsches Alterthum, Neue Folge, vol. vi. p. 153 seq. — The salt- 
pit of Salzungen on the Werra is already mentioned in a diploma of 
Charlemagne, year 775 (Wenck, Hessische Landesgeschichte, vol. iii., 
Urkunden, book No. 5) : ""Ad Salsunga super fluvium Uuisera . . . 
ubi patellas ad sale facere ftonuntur? — The river Halys (first mentioned 
by Herodotus, and named, according to Strabo, 12, 3, 12, from the 
salt springs past which it flowed) owes the Greek form of its name to 
the Hellenic colonists on the Pontic coast. If in the Armenian agh, 
salt, the gh is equal to /, and the s, after the Iranic and Greek manner, 
has passed into an aspirate, and then entirely disappeared, it would 
prove that the Armenian language, which already leans to Europe, 
possessed the European word sal, and that possibly the name of the 
river was originally a Phrygio-Armenian one. — Marine, herinc, herring, 
is very aptly explained by Mullenhof, from the German, as meaning 
y^r-fisch, fish that come in hosts (V. Rose, in the Hermes, viii. 
p. 226, 1874). With this a part of the difficulty ceases, but there 
remains the Old Norse sild, Lith. silke, Slav, seldi, which can only 
mean the salt-fish. And we do not yet see how the problem of Saale 
=salt-river, Hall= salt-pit, can be explained, except by supposing the 
latter to be a Celtic form of the word. 



Note 5, page 32. 

These subterranean dwellings are found in the most different regions : 
they are the oIkoi vjcavrpoi ko.1 kcltclckioi of the Sacae in ^lian ; the oUiai 
KctTayeioi of the Armenians described by Xenophon ; the demersae in 
humum sedes and specus aut subfossa of the Satarchs in Mela ; the 
defossi specus of the Scythians ; the subterranei specus of the Germans, 
which were covered with dung to keep out the cold, Old High Germ, 
and Mid. High Germ, tunc, whence is derived the German Dung, 
Dilnger, dung, screona in the Lex Salica, Old French escregne, etc. (see 
Wackernagel in Binding's Geschichte des burgundisch - romanischen 
Konigreichs, i. p. 333, who thinks the word German, and connects it 
with the A. Saxon scraf, antrum). Greek expressions for such caves 
are yvm], yv-napiov (used by Hesychius and Suidas, Aristoph., Equ., 



4 I2 NOTES. 



790, Old Slav, zupiste, zupiliste=zwv(\v\\i%, sepulcrum, Pol. suj>a=s&]i& 
fodina), QwXtog, to. (pwXsa (also in the form ywXeog), TpioyXrj, whence the 
name of the Troglodytes on the Arabian Gulf, in the Caucasus, etc. 
Gradually the sod-roof rose higher, and the cave under the house 
served only for a winter-dwelling and for women. But the ancient 
custom is preserved here and there to the present day, and a stranger 
approaching such a village thinks the slightly elevated roofs are 
natural risings in the ground. In Russia, wherever any earthworks 
are undertaken, for example, in making a railway, the first thing done 
is to form such caves : a funnel-shaped hole, steps on one side, and 
some logs above covered with turf, and the dwelling is complete. The 
huts of the Wallachian peasants, the so-called bordeitz, have a slanting 
entrance ; in the interior there is sometimes, but rarely, a window, 
which is pasted over with paper and lets in very little light. Towards 
the end of autumn all cracks are stopped up, doors of hurdle-work 
are fixed, and underground stables dug (see the instructive book by 
C. Allard, La Bulgarie Orient ale, Paris, 1864). The want of air 
makes these troglodyte dwellings insufferable ; the stench and suffo- 
cating atmosphere sometimes drives even the seasoned inhabitants 
out into the winter cold. Then there is the plague of fleas, of whicb 
all travellers here and throughout Siberia complain. The fleas abso 
lutely force the natives to sleep out of doors whenever the season 
allows, which is the principal cause of the frequent ague. The insects 
cover the subterranean wall so thickly that it seems black. In 
primitive times, and more to the north, where the winters are long 
(for example, in Scandinavia before it was reached by Southern 
culture), the same conditions must have prevailed in as great or a 
higher degree, and whoever wishes to realize those times, will do well 
not to forget this feature of the picture. And here let us call to mind 
another boon of civilization. Travellers in Siberia, from Pallas and 
Humboldt down to the latest, are unanimous in their descriptions of 
the torments endured in summer from gnats, midges, spiders, gad- 
flies, stinging-flies, etc., that fill the air and attack man and beast 
(see Sibirische Reise, by Middendorff, vol. iv. p. 830). It is impos- 
sible to defend one's self from these blood-suckers ; there is only one 
means, to deprive them of their habitat by draining and cutting down 
the forests. In this respect Germany, before the Roman age, was 
exactly like Siberia (Middendorff: "There is no doubt that our fore- 
fathers in the heart of Europe were also exposed to the same torments 
that are now suffered by travellers in all primitive regions. . . . Send 
the man who doubts the benefits of culture into primitive nature among 
the mosquitoes. . . . The plague of mosquitoes is undoubtedly the 
principal cause of the migrations of deer and reindeer.") It is true 



NOTES. 413 



that the skin of the ancient German must have been far more im- 
pervious to the stings of insects than that of the educated modern 
European ; but where the skin is insensible, so are also mind and soul. 



Note 6, page 32. 

That the German custom of making drinking vessels out of the 
skulls of slaughtered enemies was not derived from their Scythian or, 
later, Turkish neighbours in the East, is proved by the existence of 
the same custom among the Celts at a very early pre-Germanic period. 
The Boii in Upper Italy did the same with the head of the fallen Roman 
consul, Postumius (Livy, 23, 24 : " Purgato inde cafiite, ut mos it's est, 
calvam auro caelavere, idque sacrum vas iis erat quo solle?nnibus 
libarent, poculumque idem sacerdoti esset ac temfili antistibits''*) ; and 
Ammianus Marcell., 27, 4, in describing the primitive times of the 
Celtic Scordiscans in Illyria, uses the words : " Humanum sanguinem. 
in ossibus cafiitmn cavis bibe?ites avidius." 



Note 7, page 32. 

The custom of getting rid of old people was prevalent among the 
Teutons of Germany and Scandinavia, among the Wends, Lithu- 
anians, and Romans (see Grimm, RA., chapter 4, at the end of the 
1st volume). The same is related of Iranian nations : of the Bactrians 
(Strabo, 11, 11, 3), the Caspians (11, n* 8), the Massagetae (11, 8, 6), 
etc. Old age is unbearable, and even the gods hate it {Hymn to 
Ven., 247 : 

ovXSfiivov, Ka/jiaTT]pbv. o rs OTvyiovai 6soi rrsp). 

The aged man himself wishes that he were dead, and begs his family 
to kill him. People in a state of nature, like the peasantry now, are 
not sentimental, they are indifferent to the death of a relation, or to 
the thought of their own. What Herodotus, 5, 4, tells of a Thracian 
people, the Trausians, that they pitied the new-born child because the 
sufferings of life awaited him, and praised his death as a release, 
what Theognis says v. 425 f., and what Euripides expresses in the 
celebrated passage in the Cresphontes (Nauck, Euripidis Jragmenla., 
Lipsiae t 1869, No. 452): 

l%pr\v yap ij/xag crvWoyov Troiovfikvovq 
tov (pvvra Qpr]viiv dg oa tpx^rai icaicd, 
tov 8'a5 Qavovra /cai ttoviov TTi.iravi.dvnv 
Xaipovrag eiKprjixovvrag iK-Kt.p.TZi.iv 66 fj. 



4 i4 NOTES. 



this is at bottom the view taken by all nations at a certain stage of 
awakened reflection. It is a step farther in development, to comfort 
one's self with the hope of a life after death, free from mortal limita- 
tions, as the Getae did, whom Herodotus calls o\ aOavariZovrtG, the 
immortalizers. 

Note 8, page 32. 
Among all the Indo-European races we find, in the obscurity of 
primitive times, traces of human sacrifice and cruel burial-ceremonies ; 
gradually disappearing, like all religious delusions, according to the 
stage of humanity or connection with more civilized nations. For 
the customs of the Greeks and Romans, we refer our reader to the 
copious information contained in E. von Lasaulx's Siihnopfer der 
Griechen tmd Rotner, in the " Studien des Klassichen Alterthums," 
Regensburg, 1854, and to Welcker's " Griechische Gotterlehre." There 
are many proofs of such customs having prevailed among Northern 
nations, lasting the longer the more they approach the north-east. 
When Alexander the Great marched against the Taulentians, an 
Illyrian people, they and their neighbours sacrificed three boys and as 
many girls, and three black goats, before they went to war (Arrian, 
1, 5, 11). The Celtic Scordiscans sacrificed their prisoners to their 
barbaric gods (Amm. Marcell., 2,7,4: " Scordisci, saevi quondam et 
truces, hostiis captivorum Bellonae litanies et MartV). The Gala- 
tians of Asia Minor did the same : the pro-consul Cn. Manlius, in a 
speech before the senate (Livy, 38, 47), says that the surrounding 
nations were exposed to their disastrous incursions, " Quum vix redi- 
mendi captivos copia esset, et mactatas humanas hostias i?nmolatosque 
liberos suos audirent." Csesar, a century and a half later, reports of 
the Gauls, in Gaul proper (Be B. Gall., 6, 16) : "Qui sunt affecti 
gravioribus morbis, quique in proeliis periculisque versantur, aut pro 
victimis homines immolant aut se immolaturos vovent, adininistrisque 
ad ea sacrificia Druidibus utuntur, quod, pro vita hominis nisi 
hominis vita reddatur, non posse deorum immortalium numen placari 
arbitrajitur,publiceque ejusdem generis haboit instituta sacrificiaj" and 
Mela confirms this with an expression of horror (3, 2, 3) : " Gentes 
superb ae, superstitiosae, aliquando etiam immanes adeo, ut hominem 
optimam et gratissimam Diis victimam caederent." We find the same 
murderous belief among the Germans, Tac, Germ., 9 : " Deorum 
maxime Mercuriu?n colunt, cui certis diebus humanis quoque hostiis 
lit are fas habent;" 39; " Stato tempore in silvam . . . co'eunt, caesoque 
publice homine celebrant barbari ritus horrenda primordial Jorn. 5 : 
" Quern Mariem Gothi semper asperrima piacavere cultura {nam 
victimae ejus ?nortes fuere captorum), opina?ites, bellorum praesulem 



A'OTES. 4^5 



apte humani sanguinis effusione placandumP Procop., De B. Goth., 2, 
15 : tu>v d( Uptiiov a<p'iai to koWigtov dv9p(07r6g kariv, ov7TEp av dopidKiorov 
7roif]<ravTO irpiorov ' tovtov yap r<p "Apu Qvovoiv, lirei 9sbv avTov vofii^ovm 
fisyicTTov dvm (ol QovXirai). When the Romans under Germanicus 
entered the field on which the legions of Varus had been surrounded 
by the barbarians, the ground was strewn with the limbs of horses, on 
the boughs were stuck their heads, and in the neighbouring groves 
the altars were still standing, on which the tribunes and centurions of 
higher rank had been sacrificed ; a few survivors pointed out the 
gallows on which the common soldiers had been hanged, and the 
ditches into which the corpses had been thrown, etc. (Tac, Ann., 
1, 61). After the furious battle between the Chatti and Hermunduri, 
of which Tacitus speaks in Ann., 13, 57, and in which the Chatti were 
beaten, all that were taken alive were devoted to destruction, occisioni 
dantur. The prophetesses foretold future events from the movement 
of the victims' muscles, the splashing of their blood in the sacrificial 
cauldrons, and the position of their intestines. It was the same 
among the Cimbri (Strabo, 7, 2, 3). Among their women were holy 
prophetesses, bare-footed, grey-haired, and clothed in white linen 
mantles fastened with brooches and confined with iron girdles ; these, 
sword in hand, seized the prisoners in the camp, and led them, 
covered with the sacrificial garment, to a large iron cauldron, containing 
about twenty amphorae ; then they mounted the steps which led up to 
it, and bending over, cut the throat of each prisoner. Some prophet- 
esses prophesied from the blood which streamed into the cauldron, 
while others cut open the bodies, and examining the intestines fore- 
told a victory. Human sacrifice on a large scale was also customary 
among the Scandinavians. Thietmar of Merseburg relates that the 
Danes celebrated every nine years, in their capital city, Lethra, a 
great festival, at which 99 men and as many horses were slaughtered. 
Thietmar explains that they did this to clear themselves of all guilt 
before the gods of vengeance: " Putantes, hos eisdem erga inferos servi- 
turos et commissa crimina apud eosdem placaticros? Probably the 
same meaning of a propitiatory sacrifice prevailed in the similar great 
festival celebrated, according to Adam of Bremen, 4, 27, by the 
Swedes every nine years, at Upsala. There nine heads of every male 
creature were offered up, the bodies were hung on trees in the neigh- 
bouring grove, and left to decay ; men and dogs hung there together. 
The Scholiast, 137, adds in completion, or correction : " for nine days 
together they sacrificed every day one man, together with other 
creatures, so that in nine days there were sacrificed seventy-two 
creatures ; this sacrifice took place in spring, when day and night 
are of equal length." In times of national calamity, or as an expres 



4 i 6 NOTES. 



sion of special gratitude, men were sacrificed to the gods in an 
exceptional manner, as we are informed by old Northern legends 
(Grimm's "Teutonic Mythology," chapter on Worship.) So on the 
opposite coast of the Baltic, in Esthonia, that is, among the Prussians, 
Adam of Bremen {De situ Daniae, 224) : "Dracones adorant cum volu- 
cribus, quibus etiam vivos litant homines y quos a mercatoribus emimt, 
diligenter omnino probates, ne maculam in corpore habeant." — As 
general as this religious custom was that of slaughtering women, slaves, 
prisoners, and horses at the funeral pile of a dead man. Achilles, in 
the 23rd book of the Iliad, sacrifices to the shade of Patroclus, horses, 
dogs, and twelve young Trojans, whom he himself had caught alive 
for that purpose ; and on his own tomb Polyxena was sacrificed, as 
we read in the ,'I\iov Tiiptng of Arctinus. Among the Gauls, shortly 
before the time of Caesar, servants and proteges who had been 
favourites with their masters were ourned with his corpse {De B. Gall., 
6, 19 : "Paulo supra hanc memoriant servi et clientes,quos ab iis dilectos 
esse constabatjustisfuneribus confectis, una cremabantur") ; and relations 
jumped into the burning pyre in order to be united with the dead (Mela, 
3, 2, 3 : " Olim , . . erant qui se in rogos suorum, velut una victuri, 
libenter immitterent"). Among certain Thracian peoples, the wives of a 
dead man contended for the honour of being slaughtered athis grave — as 
Herodotus, 5, 5, relates : She that succeeds in being thus considered the 
most beloved, is applauded by every one, and buried with her husband ; 
the others are despised, and bewail their lot." The same thing is 
reported, in a longer description by Mela, 2, 2, 4, as being a universal 
Thracian custom. Among the Herulians (and probably also among 
the neighbouring and kindred nations on the Baltic) the wife hanged 
herself at the grave of her husband ; whoever neglected to do so 
would expose herself to eternal shame, and the hatred of her hus- 
band's relations (Procop., De B. Goth., 2, 14). Well-known are the 
cruel burials of the Scythians described by Herodotus, 4, 71 and 72 : 
" When the king is dead, one of his concubines is strangled and 
buried with him, as well as his cupbearer, his cook, marshal, body- 
servant, messenger, horses, etc. ; and a year after, fifty servants, 
whom the king had chosen out of his subjects — for there are no 
bought servants — are strangled, likewise fifty of the finest horses." 
Among the Slavs, as is unanimously reported by St. Boniface and 
afterwards Thietmar, the wife was burnt with her deceased husband — 
Epistle of Boniface and other bishops to King ^Ethelbald of Mercia 
(between 744 and 747, Jaffe's Monumenta Moguntina, p. 172) : 
" Wmedi, quod est foedissimum et deterrimum genus hominum, tarn 
magno zelo matrimonii amorem mutuum observant, ut mulier, viro 
proprio mortuo, vivere recuset. Et laudabilis mulier inter illos esse 



NOTES. 



417 



judicature quae propria ?nanu sibi mortem intulit, et in una strue 
pariter ardent cum viro suo j" Thietmar of Merseburg, 8, 2, says of 
the Poles : " In tempore patris sui (that is, of the father of Boleslav 
Khrabry), cu?n is jam gentilis esset, unaquaeque mulier post viri 
exequias sui igne cremati decollata subsequitur." The Prussians also 
buried horses, servants and maids, hounds, etc., with the dead — Peter 
of Dusburg, 3, 5 (Scriptores rerum prussicarum, i. p. 54) : " Unde con- 
tingebat quod cum nobilibus mortuis arma, equi, servi et ancillae, 
vestes, canes venatici et aves rapaces et alia quae spectant ad militem 
urerenttir ;" and when they were converted they had to promise 
that they would no longer burn or bury men and horses with the dead 
at a funeral — Dreger Cod. Pomeran. diplom., No. 191, of the year 
1249 (treaty between the Teutonic Knights and the Prussians) : " Pro- 
miserunt, quod ipsi et heredes eorum, in mortuis comburendis vel sub- 
terrandis cum equis sive hominibus, vel cum armis seu vestibus vel 
quibuscumque aliis preciosis rebus, vel etia7n in aliis quibuscujnque, 
ritus gentilium de cetero non servabunt." Gedimin, the Grand Duke 
of Lithuania, farther east, where heathenism and old ways lingered 
longest, was buried in the following manner as late as 1341, at the time 
of Petrarch and the commencement of the Renaissance (Stryjkowski, 
Kronika polska, end of book xi.) : " A pyre was erected of fir-wood, 
and the dead man, dressed in the clothes he had liked best when 
living, was laid upon it, as well as his sword, spear, bow and arrows. 
Then, amid the lamentations of the surrounding warriors, two falcons, 
two hounds, a living saddled horse, and the favourite servant were 
burnt with the corpse. Claws of the lynx and bear were thrown into 
the flames, as well as a portion of the booty taken from the enemy, 
and finally three captive German knights were burnt alive. When 
the flames were extinguished, the bones and ashes of the prince, the 
servant, the horse, and the dogs, etc., were collected together and put 
into a grave at the place where the rivulets Wilna and Wilia meet, 
and there covered with earth." The Edda, in the third song of 
Sigurd the slayer of Fafnir, informs us of the funeral customs of the 
Scandinavian Teutons. After Sigurd is murdered, Brunhild kills 
herself, and while dying, gives the following directions (we follow Sim- 
rock's translation) : "Burn at the side of the Lord of Hunes my 
henchmen adorned with costly chains, two at his head and two at his 
feet, also two hounds and two hawks. Thus all is evenly arranged." 
So much for Sigurd's following ; for herself she desired : " With me 
shall follow him five of my maids, also eight henchmen of gentle 
birth, my foster-brothers grown up with me, whom Budli gave to his 
child." 

What were the customs of the East Scandinavians, who, under the 



27 



4 i 8 NOTES. 

name of Russians, invaded and subdued the East of Europe, as war- 
riors, robbers, and rulers, we see from two notices, one by a Byzan- 
tine and the other by an Arab, both all the more important as they 
belong to the tenth century, and our other authorities do not reach so 
far back. Leo Diaconus (ed. Hase, 9, 6, p. 92) : The Russians, 
shut up in Dorostolum under. Svietoslav, engage in frequent battles 
with the Greeks in the open field before the walls. Once, when such 
a battle had taken place, in which Jkmor, the second in rank after 
Svietoslav, was killed, the barbarians collected the corpses by night at 
full moon, and burned them on funeral piles ; on which also, according 
to ancestral custom (kcito. top irarpiov vopov), most of the prisoners, men 
and women, were slaughtered. And they offer sacrifices to the dead 
(IvayiofiovQ), sucklings and cocks being strangled on the Danube, and 
then sunk in the stream. Still more explicit is the description given 
of a Russian burial by the Arab Ibn-Foszlan (Frahn, p. 131 seq.), who 
was an eye-witness of it in 921 or 922. A chief had died, and a girl in 
his service offered to die with him. The deceased was placed in 
a half-sitting posture on a couch in a boat ; a dog was cut in two and 
thrown into the boat ; all the dead man's weapons were laid beside 
him ; two horses were hewn asunder and the pieces thrown into the 
boat, as well as two oxen, etc. The girl was strangled with a rope by 
the men, while at the same time an old woman called the " Angel of 
Death" stabbed her to the heart with a knife; after which the two 
corpses, with all the other things, were burnt. During the slaughter 
the men kept up a great clashing with their shields to drown the 
death-cry of the girl, which might have disinclined other girls to seek 
a similar reunion with their masters. Before being killed, the girl had 
taken off her armlets and given them to the Angel of Death (whom 
the Arab calls " a devil with cruel gloomy eyes "), and had presented 
two girls who served her, the daughters of the old murderess, with 
her anklets. We pass over the remaining details, which make this 
account one of the most precious monuments of early northern anti- 
quity. J. Grimm (treatise on Cremation) passes it over in disgust, 
because it disturbs his plan ; the founder of German archaeology was 
after all a pupil of the Romantic period, and his chief design was, in 
contrast to the eighteenth century, to discover traces of a deep mean- 
ing in the childhood of a nation. — It would be easy to add to the 
above quotations, but they are sufficient to prove the universality and 
high antiquity of such customs. When we now dig up the stone or 
earth-tombs of the primitive European ages, we do not often think 
what cruelties, what pangs, what horrors may be linked with each 
atom of dust ! But nothing more clearly shows the nature of those 
early races, and the gloomy narrowness of their spirit, than this pic- 



NOTES. 419 



ture of women obliged 'to rival each other in pressing forward to a fiery 
death, of servants immolated by the dozen, of prisoners butchered in 
the gloomy forest or over the great cauldron. In Gaul, murders in 
honour of the dead had gone out of use before the arrival of the 
Romans — a result of increasing civilization ; but human sacrifices to 
the gods had to be rooted out by strict prohibitions of the Roman 
emperors (Sueton. Claud. 25 : " Druidarum religionem apud Gallos 
dirae immanitatis . . . penitus abolevit"). Tacitus paints a fascinating 
picture of the scene at the conquest of the Isle of Mona (Anglesey), 
in whose sacred groves prisoners were killed, just as they were at the 
sanctuary of Nerthus, or in the Teutoburg forest after the defeat of 
Varus. The shore of the island was held by an armed multitude ; female 
furies, clad in the colour of death, with streaming hair, waved their 
torches, while the Druids lifted their arms to heaven and cried aloud 
— all in vain, for the Romans forced a landing and felled the sacred 
trees, the witnesses of centuries of bloody mysteries {Ann. 14, 30 : 
" Excisique Inez, saevis superstitionibus sacri, ?iam cruore captivo 
adolere aras et hominum fibris consulere deosfas habebant' n ). 

The fact that bloody burials ceased spontaneously in Gaul, while 
religious human sacrifices only yielded to force, proves how much 
more easily mere popular tradition melts away before the rising light 
than the maddest religious ordinances guarded by a priesthood. The 
hold of the latter upon the Germans, Lithuanians, and Wends was 
first loosened by Christianity ; and if we are sometimes tempted to 
regret the sudden break in the organic development of a naive race, 
caused by its conversion to Semitic Christianism, we need only recall 
such features of heathen life to be reconciled to its immediate fall. We 
will also add, that every first beginning, every undertaking and founda- 
tion, demanded human blood as the warrant of its success or duration ; 
likewise every secret, for only death is completely dumb. When the 
Saxons found themselves forced to leave the west coast of Gaul and 
sail homeward, custom demanded that every tenth prisoner should 
be cruelly slaughtered before weighing anchor (Sidon. Apoll. Ep. 8, 6 : 
"Mos estremeaturis decimum quemque per aequales et cruciarias poenas 
— plus ob hoc tristi, quod superstitioso, ritu — necare "). The converted 
Franks marched to Italy under their king, Theudebert, to fight against 
the Goths under Witigis ; on the point of crossing the Po and begin- 
ning actual war, they there sacrificed what children and wives of 
Goths they found, and threw their corpses into the river as the first- 
fruits of the enterprise(Procop., D. B. Goth., 2, 25 : -xalSctg rt koi yvvdiicae 
roJV VvtOwv, ovpiTtp ivravOa tvpov, 'liptvov-tKci'i ciutCov tu aw/uara tgrui' Tromfiov 
aicpoOitna rov 7ro\*fJov Ipp'ur-ovv). When a fort or bridge was built, a 
living person was walled up (Grimm's " Teut. Myth." p. 1 14-14) ; 



420 NOTES. 



and when a town was founded, its safety and solidity were secured by 
human sacrifices. When, for example, Seleucus Nicator founded 
Antioch on the Orontes, the high priest sacrificed a virgin (*cdp»? 
7rap9kvo^) exactly between the future town and the river, and this was 
considered to secure the good fortune of the city (Joh. Malalas, 8, 
p. 256, ed. Oxon.). So, when Moscow was about to be built in 1147, 
the proprietor of the land, one Kutschko, was drowned in a pond ; 
and Cracow, according to the legend of its founding related by Kad- 
lubek, was built on the rock of the dragon slain by the two sons of 
Kraku, but not till the younger brother had killed the elder, as Romulus 
did Remus, etc. When a treasure is buried, when an action of the 
utmost secrecy is going on, of which no one must hear, all the work- 
men employed in it have to die. The chariot, clothes, and image of 
Nerthus (Mother Earth) were washed in a hidden lake, and the ser- 
vants who had assisted were drowned in the same. When King 
Alaric suddenly died in South Italy, his Goths diverted the course of a 
river, buried him in its bed, then allowed the water to return and cover 
the grave ; but lest any one should find the place, the captives who 
had been made to do the work were killed (Jorn., 29 : " Collecto capti- 
vorum agmine, sepulturae locum effodiunt . . . ne a quoquam quan- 
doque locus cognosceretttr, fossores omnes intere7nerunt "). Long before 
that, Decebalus, king of the Dacians, had tried to hide his treasures 
from the Emperor Trajan in an exactly similar manner as Cassius Dio 
relates (68, 14) : he turned aside the river Sargetias that flowed past 
his castle, buried his gold and silver in its bed, and turned the water 
back again ; his splendid garments, which might have suffered from 
the damp, were hidden in a cave, and the prisoners of war, who had 
done the work in both cases, were killed. But it was all in vain, for> 
as Dio goes on to tell us, the king's confidant, Bikilis, was taken by 
the Romans and told them what had happened. — It was the constant 
care of all ancient nations to hide their treasures from the enemy, and 
no doubt we owe to this circumstance many an antiquarian discovery 
already made or awaiting us in the future. 

In what has been said above, we have confined ourselves to the 
Indo-European nations ; but that the customs described extended 
beyond that circle is proved by the following passage in Livy r 
Epit., 49 : " Extant Ires orationes ejus {Servii Sulpicii Galbae) — una in 
qua Lusitanos propter sese castra habentes caesos fatetur, quod comper- 
tum habuerit, equo atque homine suo ritu immolatis, per speciem pads 
adoriri exercitum suum i7i ajiimo habuisse" So that the Lusitanians, 
an Iberian nation, also sacrificed a man and a horse at the commence- 
ment of a military enterprise ! And this happened between 150 and 
200 B.C., earlier than any similar transaction that we know of among 
Celts or Germans. 



NOTES. 421 



To close this gloomy picture with a more cheerful trait, we will 
remind our readers of an occurrence that took place in modern times. 
When Friedrich Wilhelm, the last Elector of Hesse, died at Prague, in 
January, 1874, the funeral car, both at Prague and afterwards at Cassel, 
where he was buried, was drawn by the eight cream-coloured horses 
of which he had been so fond ; and which, as a newspaper report 
asserted, were to be shot after performing their last service ; 
apparently for the prince to take to the heavenly regions with him, 
just as the Scythian kings had their horses sent after them. 

Note 9, page 32. 
Among the numerous vouchers for the ancient custom of casting 
lots, we will only mention here the striking occurrence which Caesar 
relates towards the close of his first book. Caesar had sent two mes- 
sengers to the camp of Ariovistus to hear his proposals. One was 
Caesar's friend, Gaius Valerius Procillus, a young man distinguished for 
virtue and culture, and acquainted with the Gallic tongue ; and the 
other, M. Metius, who stood on the footing of guest-friendship with 
Ariovistus. Scarcely had that king perceived the two Romans when 
he cried out, " You are spies ! " refused to hear them, and ordered 
them to be put in chains. Then came the battle which ended in the 
flight of the Germans ; during the pursuit, Caesar himself came up 
with the trebly fettered Valerius Procillus, and rescued him from the 
guards who were dragging him away. The liberated captive related 
that accident alone had saved him : three times before his very eyes 
the lot had been cast whether he should be burned immediately or 
spared for a later opportunity ; three times the lot had been in his 
favour, and thus he had remained alive. Caesar, as he says himself, 
was not more rejoiced at the battle he had won than at this stroke of 
good fortune, for his victory would have been dimmed if his beloved 
friend had remained in the hands of the barbarians. M. Metius was 
also found, and brought back to Caesar. 

Note 10, page 33. 
IIoXic and pofiulus contain the idea of fulness, multitude. Thiuda 
(whence thiudisk, our deutsch and Deutschland) is also found in the 
Italic, Celtic, and Lithuanian languages, and comes from the root tu, 
to swell or grow. The German lente j Slav, liudii, a people ; Old 
Prussian ludis, the master, the host, the man ; Lettish /audi's, people, 
folk, has its root in the Gothic verb liudan, to bud ; the Slavic narodu, 
race, people, world, in roditi, to beget or bring forth, etc. We will 
not here enter into this rich theme which would lead us too far, and 



422 NOTES. 



will only mention the celebrated old name of Goths. For there is no 
doubt that that name is to be explained by the verb giutan, to pour, 
Greek x«w, Latin /undo, fudi. The Goths are effusi, pro/usi, like 
mankind in general ; like the leaves of the forest which the wind blows 
down and spring causes to bud ; like the swarming of fish, and the 
seeds of life everywhere. Jesus Sir., 14, 19 : " Like the green leaves 
on a beautiful tree, of which some fall and others grow again ; so it is 
with the people, some die and some are born." Homer, II. 6, 181 : 

" Like leaves on trees the race of man is found, 
Now green in youth, now shed (x««) upon the ground ; 
Another race the following spring supplies ; 
They fall successive, and successive rise : 
So generations in their course decay ; 
So flourish these, when those are past away." 

" Shall I fight with thee," says Apollo (II. 21, 535), " on account of 
poor mortals who owe their life and nourishment to earth ; like yearly 
leaves that now smile on the sun, now wither on the ground ? " The 
Ciconians (Od. 9, 55) : 

" Thick as the budding leaves or rising flowers 
O'erspread the land, when spring descends in showers." 

The Achaeans, too, are like leaves or grains of sand (II. 2, 800). 
Homer speaks of tpuWup %v<7i£, a pouring of leaves (Hesiod, Op. et 

/>., 421): 

v\?j, <f>u\\a 8' ipaZz x^tu 

And Pindar of the corn (Pyth. 4, 42) : 

iv rq.o a<pQirov vamp ksxvtcu Aifiuag 
evpvxopov o-irkpfxa irpiv wpag. 

The same verb in Homer is used for crowds of men or animals, as in 
II. 5, 141 : of the sheep that crowd together (ictxvvrai) as they fly ; II. 
16, 259, of the myrmidons who pour forth like wasps under the leader- 
ship of Patroclus ; II. 2, 447, of the Achaeans who " crowd Scaman- 
der's flowery side" (t^Wo) ; II. 15, 345, of the Trojans streaming 
to the fight (7rpo X eovTo) ; II. 19, 222, of the bloody harvest mown down 
by steel (&«,<„) ; Od. 22, 425, of the fish that flounder panting on the 
sands { K i X vvrm\ etc. In Aristotle {Hist. anim. 5, 9, 32), X vro\ 
IxZveg are swarming fish that go in shoals and are caught in nets ; 
Hesychius has a reduplicate™**, with the meaning many,sufficient ; the 
Scholion to Theocritus, 2, 107, has an else unknown substantive ,covoc, 
a full current. Still nearer to the Latin, Gothic, and Albanian words 
(Alban. heth, huth, I pour, throw), are the forms nxvtiw, to flow abun- 



NOl'ES. 423 



dantly (in Theocritus), x^V^t abundantly, in heaps, x^ rt '£w, x v ^ a '°f> 
XvSa'iffTi, x^«'ow, x v ti ai °rnG — all referring to what is popular, common, 
vulgar. That the Latin /undo was also used of the generative 
power of the earth is proved by passages like that in Lucretius, 5, 917 : 
" Tempore quo firimum tellus animaliafudit j " Cic, " terra fruges fun- 
ditj" Virg., " fimdit victum tellus, fundit humus /lores" etc. Just so the 
Old Norse gjota is to beget ; got or gota, fetura piscium ; while the 
meaning, *' to pour," is almost lost in that dialect. So the Goths, both 
of Germany (Gulos, Gutans) and of Scandinavia (Gautar, Gotar), are 
simply those poured out, teei7ied from the bosom of the earth, the 
mass of living men (as the Gothic name for the world is mana-seths, 
men-seed), a name that is far more ancient than the proud compounds 
with which Celtic and also German nations adorned themselves in 
later and historic times. — In the Lithuano-Slavic languages giutan is 
altogether lost, and is replaced by Slav, liyati, liti, to pour ; Lith. 
lett, to pour ; letas, pouring ; lyti, to rain ; lytus or letus, rain. It is 
not at all far-fetched to find in this word the root of the names 
Lithuania and Lithuanian, Letuva and Letuvis, as well as that of their 
neighbours and fellows in culture, the Goths, in giutan. 



Note ii, page 33. 

The Greek xiXtoi, ^olic xeXXkh, has lately been identified with the 
Sansk. sahasra, Zend, hazanra. If this be correct — which we leave 
undecided — the Greeks have borrowed their word for thousand — as 
mille and thusundi show — from Asia, the home of high numbers 
and giant periods, just as they formed their fivpioi, with the usual 
change of b into m, from the Zendic baevare, or one of the correspond- 
ing West Iranic forms. Benfey thinks that all the other European 
nations had lost their common designation of the number thousand, 
as well as their ancient culture, during their long migrations, and had 
afterwards to re-invent them. But this is contrary to the nature of 
the human mind. A people that moves into new places might forget 
many natural objects to which they had been accustomed in their 
former home, but if they had once been able to grasp the idea of 
thousa?id they could never again deteriorate from that stage of 
psychical development. The conception of such a quantity as thou- 
sand is nothing like so easy to the child of nature as one would think, 
and it is not at all surprising that the immigrating Indo-Europeans 
should not yet have known how to express it. The Finns first learnt 
from the Slavs to think and say a hundred, and the common Russian 
still calls ten thousand tma — obscurity. 



4 2 4 NOTES. 



Note 12, page 60. 

Since the above sketch of the Horse was finished, two writings 
important to the theme have appeared, the contents of which are not 
in general contradictory to our deductions, but rather, from an 
archaeological point of view, confirm them. We mean the Silbervase 
von Nicopol, by L. Stephani, which vase the author refers to the fourth 
century B.C., the best period of Greek art ; and the Sepulchral 
Chamber of Kertch described by W. I. Stassoff (Chambre Sipulcrale 
avec Fresgues, decouverte en 1872 pres de Kertsch, St. Petersburg, 
1875, S r - 4°) As tne acute and erudite author of the latter treatise 
was assisted in his work by the celebrated traveller and hippologist 
A. von Middendorfif, and frequently refers to the Vase of Nicopolis, 
we believe our readers will be grateful if we here give a concise 
account of what the said inquirers have gained for the history of the 
horse by the archaeological method. My own brief remarks are 
inserted in brackets. 

The monuments of Oriental and classical antiquity show us three 
types of horses : the horse of the steppe, the half-draught horse (more 
fitted for drawing than for riding \demi-cheval de trait), and the 
saddle-horse (cheval de selle). On the Vase of Nicopolis the first two 
kinds are faithfully portrayed. The horse ridden by the herdsman is 
a saddled, pure steppe horse, resembling the modern Calmuck horses ; 
while the horses of the herd itself are no longer of the primitive breed 
of the steppes, but rather draught than saddle horses, and seem 
reared on fertile bottom lands. They are similar to the Assyrian 
horses depicted on the walls of Khorsabad. The Assyrian horse is 
also a half-draught animal, and points to still richer grass lands. (It 
does not seem to me that the improved Scythian horse can be derived 
from the Assyrian animal ; their resemblance is probably explained 
by their common origin in Media.) An older Assyrian breed, with 
which we are made familiar by the Nineveh sculptures, rather 
resembles the archaic Greek horses depicted on vases. This latter 
animal is described as follows — very slender legs, stout croup, long 
round neck ; joining of the neck to the breast like that of a stag ; 
hair of the tail, mane, and forehead, short ; the tail standing off. The 
same features are found in the Egyptian horse, and the Greek horse 
gained its shape under Egyptian influence (historically I think it 
hardly possible ; both kinds may have come from the same region, 
Western Asia, and much about the same period). In contrast to the 
above-named two types is the third, the thorough riding horse seen 
on the monuments of the Sassanides and those of the Romans ; for 
example, in the bas-reliefs of Trajan's column. It is not tall, has a 
short body and legs, is strong, sinewy, broad-chested, and rather 



NOTES. 425 



short-necked ; it must have been developed from the Arabian horse ; 
its ancestor may be seen in the sculptures of Persepolis. From this 
horse or its relations the Sassanide and Roman horse derived its 
compact form and noble head. (When first the Persian Empire, then 
the Macedonian, Greek, and lastly the Roman, rendered general 
exchange and traffic possible, an increasingly beautiful breed of horses 
spread farther and farther, from the Euphrates to the Tiber, and 
from the Tigris to the Nile. Hence the similarity of race in the later 
representations of the Iranic East and European West. The same 
times and circumstances created the Arab, which since then has 
become the noblest of its kind, as the Median had been before.) In 
the. frescoes of the sepulchral chamber at Kertch, which belong to the 
period between the beginning of the second and end of the fourth 
century A.D., and which have nothing Greek or Roman about them, 
we find the inhabitants of Panticapaeum in possession of the im- 
proved Arabian horse ; the only animal there that is at all like the 
primitive race of the steppes being that in picture 6 ; at the same 
time all the accompaniments, ornaments, weapons, costumes, etc., are 
Iranian in character. Another striking proof of the hypothesis that 
the primitive inhabitants of the coasts of the Black Sea and Sea of 
Azov, among whom the Greeks planted colonies, were of Iranian blood, 
which afterwards got mixed with, or was supplanted by, the Turkish. 

All this presupposes that the authors of the drawings and reliefs 
went to work in a naturalistic way, and did their best to seize and 
reproduce the features of the living object before them. But how if 
they lived in an age of religious and artistic conventionalism, and 
merely imitated the stiff forms of a given style ? Or if, living in a 
freer time, they obeyed the laws of ideal beauty such as they were 
capable of conceiving ? In the oldest Greek sculptures the men look 
like Egyptians — must we therefore conclude that nature bestowed 
Egyptian faces on the old Greeks, and that the latter were even 
descended from Egyptians? It will be seen that in this case the 
history of art has a word to say, but the result is only to make inquiiy 
into the dates of the monuments preserved to us still more doubtful 
and complicated. 

Thus much as regards the above-named essay. The present writer 
does not in the least imagine that he has exhausted the subject by his 
more historic treatment, or that all questions relating to it are solved. 
Still he believes that he has established the principal points of view, 
and quoted the weightiest authorities ; arranging the latter according 
to the former. Many interesting facts, such as Castration, which ori- 
ginated with the Scythians, Sarmatians, etc., in the east of Europe 
(Strabo 7, 4, 8) ; and Shoeing, which was unknown to antiquity, and 



426 .NOTES. 



is first proved with certainty to have existed among the Byzantines in 
the ninth century (Beckmann's Beitrage, 3, 122), have been passed over 
because they seemed irrelevant to primitive history. 

Note 13, page 61. 
The formation of the word IltXaayoL is not yet satisfactorily 
explained, but its meaning seems to be that given in the text. 
Strabo 7, Exc. I and 2 : <j>aoi dt icai Kara rr\v ro>v MoXorroiv ical GetrTfpwrwv 
yXutTTCiv rag ypaiag niX'tag KciktioSrcu icai rovg ykpovrag irtXiovg. The 
same immediately afterwards, with the addition : KaQairep icai irapd 
NctKtSooi' rreXtyovag yovv icaXovaiv Ltteivoi rovg tv ripalg, icaOa rrapd Aclkuhti 
icai MaaoaXiuraig rovg ykpovrag. To this may be added the Albanian 
fltiah=senex, vetus. yEschylus makes Pelasgus call himself the son 
of the earth-born Palsechthon, Suppl. 250 : 

Tow yrjytvovg yap tip? iyu) HaXaix9ovog 
Ivtg HeXaayug, r}jg ctyfjg dpxriyirtjg. 

In Homer ^7oiIl£\a(T7oi=the venerable. The name rpaiKol, Graed,h3.s 
the same meaning, and 'ldovzg probably the contrary one. 

Note 14, page 61. 
Some modern philologists, such as Deimling (Die Leleger, Leipzig, 
1862), consider the Lelegian nations and tribes to be early immigrants 
from Asia Minor ; in which case they would have had no right to be 
called Greeks and near relations of the Pelasgo-Hellenes. If they 
were such by religion and speech, they could have had no other origin 
than that of the European Indo-Germans in general, and the Greco- 
Italians in particular. Asia Minor was peopled (1) in the north by 
western offshoots of the great Iranian race, which already formed a 
connecting link with Europe, viz., the Armenians and their kinsmen 
by blood and language, the Phrygians (see the express testimony of 
Eudoxus and Strabo) ; (2) in the south-east^ by branches of the 
Semitic family ; (3) in the middle, by races which in blood and 
culture were a mixture of the two. Thracians, pressing forward from 
the Danube, may have early reached the south coast of the Propontis 
by way of the Hellespont ; and Pelasgians and Leleges the western 
shore, by one of the numerous chains of islands that almost bridge 
the sea. They were then penetrated in the north with Lydian and 
Phrygian elements, and in the south absorbed or governed by the 
Semites. But in return, the Carians — a nation which in Herodotus : s 
time considered itself aboriginal to Asia Minor — went over into the 



NOTES. 427 



islands, where they made slaves of the Leleges, and here and there 
occupied points on the continent — for example, Epidaurus. In the 
same east-and-west direction Phrygian tribes passed over into Thrace, 
and introduced Oriental culture, so far as they possessed it, into 
Europe. Herodotus once mentions, in passing (7, 20), a great migra- 
tion of the Mysians and Teucrians over the Bosphorus, which took 
place in pre-Trojan times. They are said to have subjugated all the 
Thracians, and penetrated to the Adriatic Sea, and southward to the 
river Peneus. Our Giseke {Thrakischpelasgische Stamme der Balkan- 
halbinsely Leipzic, 1858) has built a whole book on the passage, 
and reconstructed a large part of the primitive history of Greece on 
that basis. The two straits that close in the Propontis may have 
often witnessed such and counter-migrations. The Pasonians on the 
Strymon may have been the remains of one, though the assertion 
of the two Pasonians in Herodotus (5, 12, 13) that they were descen- 
dants of the Trojan Teucrians may be only an echo from the Iliad, 
where the Pasonians are allies of the Trojans, and though the 
manners of the Paeonian maiden struck Darius as particularly un- 
Asiatic ; but the Great Migration, which gave Greece and Italy their 
similar population, and further away comprises the Celts, and north- 
ward the Germans, Slavs, and Lithuanians, certainly did not take 
place from Asia Minor. 

Note 15, page 62. 
However thankful we may be to the late Von Hahn for his com- 
munications relating to the Albanian language and customs, his 
speculations on their primitive history cannot be accepted. The 
attempt to explain the old Lycian inscriptions by means of modern 
Albanian, and to stamp that idiom as specifically Iranian (O. Blau in 
the Zeitschrift der D. M. G., xvii. 649) was undertaken with such 
scanty materials that it necessarily fell through. We may, therefore, 
feel astonished that Justi, in the preface to his handbook of the Zend 
language, is inclined to entertain such an airy hypothesis, and to con- 
sider the Albanian dialect " an offshoot of the Aryan languages, and 
especially a descendant of the Lycian speech." There is nothing as 
yet to prove that the Thracians were a pure Iranian race, as P. de 
Lagarde (Gesammelte Abhandlungen, p. 281), and, after him, Roesler 
{Dacierund Romdnen, p. 81, in the Reports of the Academy of Vienna, 
1866) are inclined to assert. The only Thracian gloss which has an 
undeniably Iranian stamp is the name of the so-called Thracian tribe 
of the Saraparai, or beheaders, in Strabo (11, 14, 14) ; but this will 
people lived beyond Armenia, in the heart of Asia, in the vicinity of 
the Guranians and Medians, and it was tliere that they acquired that 



428 NOTES. 



nick-name. Examine Strabo's words : <pam 5k (mind, only " they say") 
Kai QpaK&v Ttvag, tovq irpocrayopivofievovg (by the surrounding nations ?) 
Sapairapag, oiov K^aXoTOfxovg, oUr/cai virip tt)Q 'Apfisviag, irXi]<jiov Yovpav'nov 
Kai MrjSuv, Orjpiudug avOpwrrovg Kai a7rei$iig, optivovg, irtpioKv9i(TTag re Kai 
cnroKt<pa\«TTag. If the Thracian (3pi£a be really connected with vrihi, 
rice, it was very likely a foreign word that had travelled from India by 
way of Iran and Asia Minor to the Thracians, and therefore proves 
nothing. The Thracian demon Zalmoxis, or Zamolxis, says Porphyrius 
in the Life of Pythagoras, was so called because directly after his 
birth a bear's skin was thrown over him — n)v yap dopav ep$Ktg ZaXfibv 
KaXovmv. If o\£ig here means bear, it would certainly agree with the 
Aryan, but not less with the European words : Greek dpKrog, Latin 
ursus for urctus. If we join the \i to the second half, as jxolig, we have 
the Lithuanian meszka, Slavic me'cika, the bear. But as skin-bear 
cannot be said for bear-skin, P. de Lagarde thinks of explaining 
Z,a\fxolig as meaning the brown skin; but even this results in nothing 
specifically Iranian ; \iolig would have its analogue in Europe in the 
Slavic mechii, fur, fell, and the Slavs are no Iranians ; KaX is also 
quite common in Europe ; for example, Lith. zalas, green, zelti, to 
grow green, zole, grass ; Slav, zdliye herb, zelhiyi green, etc. 15 ut 
the explanation brown skin has two important faults. First, no god 
or man can be simply called skin, and the only thing that is probable, 
or in accordance with the thought of the Northern nations, is that the 
Thracians imagined their god in the form of a bear, or as clothed \n a 
bear-skin, and styled him accordingly ; secondly, the word which is 
said to form the first part of the compound never means brown or 
dark yellow, but always green, or greenish yellow, and is therefore 
unsuitable for a bear-skin. So there is nothing to be gained for the 
Iranian origin of the Thracians from the name Zamolxis ; and either 
— as was common with the ancients after Herodotus — Porphyrius 
coined his ZaXp.6g = skin, out of the name of Zalmoxis ; or that word, if 
correctly quoted, corresponds to the Greek x\a/n'»c, cloak (as Fick pro- 
posed) ; in which case the latter half of the word would mean some- 
thing like -clad or -ed in fur-clad, furred. On the other hand, the con- 
nexion of the Thracians and the kindred Dacians and Getae— they all 
spoke one language, as Strabo expressly asserts — with the nations of the 
north is manifold. Grimm, while pursuing his unfortunate hypothesis, 
proved many kindred features between the Getae and Germans; an 
analogy between the Getic and Slavic tongues was acutely recog- 
nised by Mullenhof (see the article "Geten" in the Encyclopaedia of 
Ersch and Gruber). Among the Dacian names of plants the only 
two that can be explained, propedula, cinquefoil, and dyn, nettle, are 
pure Celtic. Similar things turn up as regards the Illyrians. In 



NOTES. 429 



modern Albanian vially is mountain, and di two. Niebuhr ( Vortrdge 
iiber alte Ldnder-und Volkerkunde, p. 305, Berlin, 185 1) pointed out 
that these two words exactly make up the name of the old Illyrian 
city Dimallum, which stood on a two-peaked mountain ; and that 
Albanian must be a sprout from the ancient Illyrian. But, surprising to 
say, there is an Old Irish word, meall = hill, height, and the Gallic 
names Mellosectum, Mellodunum (literally hill-fortress, now Meluri), 
contain the same word (see Gliick, on the Celtic names in Caesar, p. 
138). The Altinian, that is, Venetic, and therefore Illyric, ceva — cow 
(in Columella) — now in Albanian ka, kau = ox — curiously agrees 
with the German in sharpening the consonant, whilst other Aryan 
languages retain the media g, as in Sansk. gau, go, Slav. gov-yddo y 
etc. (may not Kayka = ox-eye, in Dioscorides, 3, 146, contain the same 
Albanian word, prefixed to the Lith. afo's, Slav, oko, Latin oculus y 
etc ?) The Albanian lyope, lyopa — cow, goes westward through the 
Alps and Switzerland to the Romance dialects on the Lake of Geneva 
(Bridel, Glossaire die Patois de la Suisse romande, p. 266, Lausanne, 
1866). Was it a Venetic or Euganean word found among the inhabi- 
tants of the Alps by the conquering Celts, which, as often happens with 
the names of primitive human occupations, especially in the mountains, 
has been preserved down to the present day ? The Messapic fipsvSog, 
stag (Mommsen, Unteritalische Dial., p. 70) in modern Albanian dren 
(with d for b ?), is found again in the Old Pruss. braydis, elk ; Lith. 
bredis, elk and stag ; Lettish breedis. The longer and more attentively 
we observe the Thracians and Illyrians, the more we are convinced 
that this double race — the one-half of which Herodotus thought to be 
the most numerous after the Indians — held, not only geographically, but 
ethnologically, and as regards religion and language, a central position 
from which branches proceeded not only to the Iranians, but also to 
the north and south, west and east, of the continent. 



Note 16, page 64. 
In the text, speaking of a subject that only allows of doubtful con- 
jectures, and can only be judged by the general impression made one 
way or the other on different minds, we have admitted that some 
kind of agriculture may have existed before the end of the Aryan 
Migrations ; but personally we incline to the contrary view. The 
commonest opinion is, that though the primitive Indo-European people 
was not yet agricultural, for no cognate terms for the art can be 
decisively shown in Sanskrit ; yet that such words as arare, molere, 
etc., which are found among the European members of that family, 
prove the existence of an agricultural European mother-nation. We 



430 



NOTES. 



must first remark that those who assert this, accompanying that asser- 
tion with considerations as to the earlier or later separation of one or 
the other branch from the parent stock, and setting up pedigrees 
founded on that idea, are guilty of evident inconsequence. For \i all 
the European races did not migrate as an undivided whole, and at the 
same time, into Europe ; then arotron, aratrum, Slavic radio, etc., 
can only have been taken over by one race from another, or been 
analogously formed by the several races, perhaps at widely- distant 
periods. It must be remembered, that in those early times the 
languages were still very closely related, and that when some technical 
process, some tool, etc., was adopted from a neighbouring nation, the 
name it went by in that nation would quickly and easily find its place 
in the dialect of the borrowing nation. If, for example, a verb molere, 
in the sense of to crush, to crumble, and another, severe to strew, 
existed in all languages of the formerly pastoral races, and one of these 
gradually learnt from another the arts of sowing and grinding, it 
would be sure to select out of the various word-roots of similar but 
more general meaning just the one by which the teaching nation had 
designated the new operation. Thus an identity of names, say for 
the plough, would only prove that the knowledge of it had spread 
from member to member of the Indo-European family in Europe ; 
that one portion had not received it, say from Asia, or through the 
Semites from Egypt, another from the Iberians in the Pyrenees 
and on the Rhone, a third from some unknown people, and so on. 
And the additions by which A. Fick {Die ehemalige Spracheinheit 
der Indogerma?ie7i Europas, p. 289) has tried to increase our old 
stock of arguments cannot alter this state of things. If you attach 
modern ideas to the ancient words, you will easily find the whole of 
our present life reflected in the time of the earliest beginnings. What, 
for example, can be made out of lira, a furrow ? In Germanic lan- 
guages this word means track, rut (as in gleise, i.e., ge-leise), which 
was evidently the true and original meaning, which still peeps out in 
the Latin delirare, to deviate from the track. After their adoption of 
agriculture, perhaps at very different periods, the Lithuanians and Slavs 
used the same word in the sense of ploughed field, the Latins in that 
of furrow, while the Germans retained the meaning of track. Such 
words as cubitus t stipula, pinsere, etc., prove still less. A halm, or 
stalk, need not have meant a stalk of corn in particular ; the Slavic 
stiblo and its congeners mean stalk in general, and the German 
stoppel, stubble, is a recent loan from Middle Latin. Pinsere meant 
pounding or bruising in general ; when corn was no longer eaten 
directly from the roasted ear in primitive fashion, but was first freed 
from the husk by pounding, and reduced to a kind of rough meal, the 



NOTES. 431 



verb either existed already and offered itself as a name for that opera- 
tion, or accompanied the operation from district to district. In quite 
historic times the North-European nations had scarcely adopted the 
most necessary beginnings of agriculture. The Celts in the interior 
of Britain and Ireland, as described by Strabo, Tacitus, Cassius Dio, 
etc. — or the Wends of Tacitus, who latrociniis pererrant the woods of 
Eastern Europe — cannot possibly be imagined as industrious husband- 
men. 

Fick says of ancient Germany, p. 289 : '■' It must have been a well- 
cultivated land, for without assiduous tilling of the ground it could not 
have sent forth the enormous masses of nations that shattered the 
Roman Empire." Roscher has proved the fallacy of this oft-repeated 
argument. The very contrary is the truth ; the higher the form of life 
to which a nation has attained, the smaller is the percentage employed 
in war-like enterprises ; while in unsettled nations every grown man 
will migrate and fight. If the Germans had tilled the ground, they 
would not have gone forth at all to shatter the Roman Empire ; more 
likely their own country would, like Gaul, have become a Roman 
province. 

In what follows we add a few scattered contributions to the ancient 
agricultural language, which, if completely and above all critically 
expounded, would be no contemptible aid to the researches of natura- 
lists into the origin and fatherland of the various kinds of corn, etc. 

Gothic hvaiteis, wheat, is white corn, therefore, as the epithet 
implies, a later kind, for the name presupposes a knowledge of some 
darker grain. Wheat is not found so far north as other cereals, but 
appeared and was acclimatized in Central Europe at a late period. 
The Lithuanian fcwetys, plural kweczei, Prussian gaydis, is not found 
in the Slavic languages, and must therefore have been adopted after 
the separation of the two branches. Now as Celtic languages also get 
their white and wheat from one root (Breton gwenn, white, gwiniz 
wheat, etc., from the Old Gallic vindos, white— as in Vindobona, 
Vienna — which again is founded on cvind), it follows that this grain 
came from the Gauls to the Germans, and from these to the 
Lithuanians (yEstyans). The Greek alp/ii, alphiton, barley meal, 
literally white corn again, may have taken its name from a new 
method of bruising or grinding, which produced a cleaner flour. 
Greek pyros, wheat, as old as Homer, is found again in the Old Slavic 
pyro, wheat, peas or lentils, and in the Lithuanian fiurai, winter-wheat 
(dialectic). But its first and oldest meanings, no doubt, are preserved 
in the Northern tongues: Russian pyrei, Czech. pyr, etc., quitch-grass; 
Prussian pure, tare ; A. Saxon fyrs, lolium, ruscus, Engl, furze. So 
it was a name for a kind of grass, and was afterwards applied to wheat 



NOTF.S. 



and other corn. The Thracians and the Skythai georgoi may have 
thus named the wheat grown by them and preserved in subterranean 
caves. The Slavic zh'lo, grain, is clearly a formation from zki-ti, to 
live (Root zhiv) ; the already Homeric sitos can only be connected 
with it if it was a foreign word from the Myso-Thracian North, which 
is not at all impossible. 

If wheat be a southern corn, Oats on the contrary are a northern 
growth. The ancients looked upon the Oat as a weed that mixed with 
the corn, or into which the corn degenerated, in both cases lessening or 
destroying the harvest. Theophrastus, h. pi., 8, 92 : 6 d' aiyiXwi// icai 
6 ppofiog, uxxirsp ayp' arret /cat avrjfispa. CatO, De re rust., $7, 5 : " Frume?lta 
face bis s arias rune esque avenamque destringas." Cicero, Defin., 5, 30, 
9 : " Ne seges quidem igitur spicis tiberibus et erebris, si avenam uspiam 
videris." Virg., Georg., 1, 154 : 

" Infelix loliutn et steriles dominantur avejiae." 

Ovid, Fast. 1, 691 : 

" Et careant loliis oculos vitiantibus agri, 
Nee sterilis culto surgat avena loco." 

Plin. 18, 149 : " Primum otmiium fru??ienti vitium avena est: et hor- 
deum in earn degenerate However, men learned later to distinguish a 
grain-bearing sort of oats from the avena fatua. Pliny believed that 
as precious corn changed into oats, so oats could turn into a kind of 
corn, frumenti instar, and adds that the Germans even sowed oats 
and lived exclusively on the kind of porridge made of them : quippe 
quu?n Germaniae populi serant earn, neque alia pulte vivant. In the 
Middle Ages the same thing is still reported of the British Celts 
(Girald. Cambr., Descr., 40 : " Totus prope?7iodum populus armentis 
pascitur et avenis, lacte, caseo et butyro j came plenius,pane parcius 
vesci solet"). The Scotchman can still live on oatmeal porridge, and 
oat-porridge with lard is a favourite dish of Swabian and Alemannian 
peasants. The later Greeks at least knew of oats as fodder (Galen, De 
aliment oruni facultatibus, 1, 14) ; in Asia, especially in Mysia, oats 
are very frequent : rpotp>) & iarlv vTro'Cvyiuv, ovk av9pu)7ru)v, d fit) ttots dpa 
\ip.(i)Trovr(.Q iax aTW Q avayKaadfnv Ik rovrov rov (nrepfiarog apro7roieicr$ai. 
As to the names of this grain, Grimm has made the fine discovery 
(Gesch. d. d. Sfir., 66) that they are indeed all different, but that they 
all come from that of the sheep or goat; "be it," he adds, "that the 
animal looks out for the wild oat (perhaps a weed similar to it), or used 
formerly to be fed with oats." The last supposition is incorrect, and 
the reason must be different. In contrast to Jicus, the fruit-bearing 
fig-tree, caprificus or goat's-fig-tree is the wild unfruitful kind which the 



NOTES. 433 



Messenians called rpdyog, or goat (Pausanias,4,2o, i). Tpayavwas said of 
Sterile vines (Suid. sub. V. : <al rpayav <pa<ri rovg dfiireXovg, orav firi Kapirbv 
titpwmv). Theophrastus ascribed this sterility to over-rank growth (De 
caus.pl., 5) 9j IO : t% vTrep(So\rjg Sh <ai rb rpayav rijg afxireXov, Kal oaoig dXXoig 
ctKapirtiv ov[j,(3aivei Sid rr/v ev(3Xa<rreiav). Here also belongs caftreolus, 
the vine-shoot, Italian capriuolo, as well as the obsolete hirquitallus, 
hirquitallare (to put forth as it were a wanton goat's-branch, afterwards 
only said of boys when their voices broke on arriving at puberty). If 
(says Theophrastus, h. pi., 8, 7, 5) a wheat-field is quite trodden down, 
for example, by the march of an army, the next year only small ears 
grow, such as are called dpvtg, lambs, rams (that is, unfruitful, de- 
generated). To the Greek names of plants already quoted by Grimm 
— aiyi\io\p, spurious oats, alyiirvpog (with a short v in Theocritus, yet 
evidently from nvpog, wheat, and not from nvp) and j3p6p.og, oats (con- 
nected with ppujfiog, goat-smell, Ppwfuofyg, j3pop,u)drig, smelling like a 
goat, though grammarians afterwards tried to distinguish the two 
words by a short and a long vowel) — there may be added KoXoKwBa 
aiyog (for cucurbita silvatica in Dioscor., 4, 175) and alpa, darnel, 
IZaipovaQai, to change into darnel (compared with Latin aries, Lithua- 
nian eris). All this shows, that when oats were called " goat's-weed," 
it was intended to describe them as empty and without value, as a 
corn-like weed ; the name presupposes an acquaintance with cereals, 
and though the species was first used for human food in the North, it 
must have come, together with its name, from the South, perhaps by 
way of Thrace. 

Rye y which only just grazes the northern frontier of the two classical 
countries, was considered by the later Romans, when they came to 
know it, as a nasty, black, distasteful, and indigestible grain. It is 
still disliked by the Romance nations, and Goethe justly remarks 
(" Campaign in France, Sept. 24, 1792 ") that " white bread and black 
are really the shibboleth, the battle-cry between Germans and French- 
men." Where the girls are black, the bread is white, and vice versa. 

Soldaten-Trost. 
Nein, hier hat es keine Notk, 
Schwarze Madchen, weisses Brodj 
Morgen in ein ander Stadtchen, 
Schwarzes Brod und weisse Madchen. — GOETHE. 

By frumentum, corn, the Romance nations mean chiefly wheat {for- 
mento^froment) ; by korn the North German means chiefly rye, as the 
Swede means barley. In the Alps however, a cold region, the 
Taurini, a branch of the Ligurians, cultivated rye, which they called 
asia (Pliny, 18, 141). In Latin we first find the name secale in Pliny, 

28 



NOTES. 



in Diocletian's Edict sicale (meaning perhaps sickle-corn), which now 
runs through the Romance tongues, including the Wallachian, and 
has intruded also into Celtic languages, into Albanian and modern 
Greek I Alb. thekere, Wal. secure. Mod Greek stk.ili] , with a striking 
removal of the accent to the first syllable ; Italian segola, se'gala, 
French . v V. etc. This was the name within the boundaries of the 
Roman Empire ; among the Hyperborean nations, in the true rye- 
region, we find another wide-spread nomenclature : Old High German 
rocco. Old Xorse rugr, A. Saxon ryge, Pruss. rugis, Lith. ruggys 
(pi. rr/ggei), Russ. rozh, Czech, rezh, etc., Magyar rosz ; among the 
West Finns the same word with the more antiquated g, k; among the 
East Finns. Tartars, etc., with the Slavic assibilation. This last fact, 
as well as the agreement between the Germans, Lithuanians, and 
Baltic Finns, comes of the word having travelled from one nation to 
another ; but to which nation did it first belong ? Benfey {Griech. 
]Vurzellexicon y 2, 125) thinks that rye meant red corn, and came to 
the Germans from Slav-land ; but the words that signify red, rust, etc., 
have in the Slavic tongues a radical d, from which, and not from g, 
their ambiguous zh has arisen. The isolated Cambrian rhygen, r/ivg, 
seems to have been borrowed from the Anglo-Saxon, as the absence of 
consonant-change shows ; and the equally isolated provincial French 
rigitet (in Dauphine, see De Belloguet, Ethncge'nie Gauloise. 1, 
p. 148) may have been casually dropped there in the course of the 
Teutonic Migration. Another significant form of name is handed 
down to us by Galen \De alim. facult. 1, 131 from Macedonia and 
Thrace. There he found a kind of corn, which was ground into an 
evil-smelling black flour, evidently rye ; it was cultivated by the abori- 
gines, and called by the native name SuiZa. The ? of the second 
syllable is easily recognised as a^ soft, which is also found in the 
Slavic rozk, etc, and was to be expected among Scythians, an 
Iranian race. Xow, has the v before the r been lost in going north- 
wards — which often happens — and must we look for the root of the 
word among those that begin with vr f or is fioiZa identical with the 
Greek ooiCa, rice, which came to the Greeks from India (Sanskrit 
irrVu) through Persia ? To what nation then is due the change of the 
vowel to a deeper u, and of the h into g, with quite the Teutonic 
" shifting of sound," though we know the Germans dwelt north and 
west of the Thracians, Scythians, and Slavs, and thus were the last to 
receive the word ? or must we suppose that they adopted the word at 
a time when the assibilation of the guttural had not yet appeared 
among those mediating nations ? De Candolle (Geographie Botamque, 
P- 938)i believes the district between the Alps and the Black Sea, the 
present Austrian Empire, to be the home of the rye, certainly on not 



NOTES. 435 



very weighty grounds. As to the origin of the cereals in general, we 
refer our readers to Humboldt (Ansichten der Natur, i. p. 206, etc., 
ed. 3, Stuttgart, 1871) ; at present nothing more can be said on the 
subject than what is contained there. 

The ancient name for the primitive plough, which consisted of a 
pointed, crooked piece of wood, is in Lithuanian szaka, bough, tooth, 
prong, the end of a stag's antlers ; Old Slavic sokha, piece of wood, 
stake ; and in the modern languages sometimes fork, gallows, but 
principally hook. Now as the Slavic s, Lithuanian sz, is sometimes 
derived from an original k, German h, we may be allowed to identify 
the Gothic hoha, plough, Old High German huohili, with the Lithu- 
anian szaka and Slavic sokha. But hoha itself evidently belongs to 
the verb hahan, with a nasalized sub-form hangan (perhaps the long o 
arose from the suppression of the n\ from which verb a multitude of 
expressions for the ideas " crooked, angular, bend, joint," etc., are 
derived : for example, the German haken, hook, hacke, heel, henge, 
hinge, henkel, handle, Old High Germ, hahhila, pot-hook, Greek 
koxuvt], kokkvZ, os sacrum ; further developed with s : German hdchse, 
hough, knee-cap, Latin coxa, huckle-bone, corner of the field-fence, 
Old Irish cos, Cambrian coes, with guttural dropped, hip or thigh, etc. 
With this agree several West-Finnish words, all indeed borrowed 
from Teutonic, but some of them — a fact observable in several other 
cases — before our Teutonic consonant-change took place ; Esthonian 
konks, hook, kook, tooth of a harrow, hook on a well, pot-hook ; 
letter for letter the Gothic hoha, etc. That the Greek yvr\q at first 
meant nothing but a crooked piece of wood, a bent bone, we learn 
from the kindred words to. yvla, the knees, later, any limb ; yviog 
crooked ; yviooj, to lame ; yvaXov, crookedness ; ' AfupiyvqeiQ, limping 
with both legs, the lame Hephsestos (not correctly explained by 
Welcker, Gr. Gotterl., 1, 633), etc. So hoha was originally a crooked 
antler, a bent bough or bone, with which the soil was torn up. Ac- 
cordingly the Celtic words suh, soch, ploughshare, Old High Germ. 
seh, sech, French soc, cannot be related to the Slavic sokha. 

To the Slavo-German circle of culture belong also the Gothic hlaifs, 
bread, and qicairnus, mill, millstone. Hlaifs, hlaibs (in all Teutonic 
dialects), Lithu. klepas, Lett, klaifis, Slav, khlebii (in all Slavic languages) 
are the same as the Latin libutn (" undoubtedly for clibum" Corssen, 
Kritische Nachtrage zur lateinischen Fonnenlehre, p. 36) and Greek 
ic\i(3avov, Kpij3avov. That the word, and therefore the art of baking 
bread, a late one everywhere, came to the Slavs from the Germans, is 
proved by the initial having suffered consonant-change in German 
fashion ; the Lithuanians, with whom the guttural aspirate is wanting, 
replaced it, as in similar cases, by the corresponding tenuis. The 



436 



NOTES. 



original meaning was that of a round cake made of dough and baked 
in the oven, in contrast to the older porridge. In Greece the word 
was very old, for Alkman already uses Kpiflawrog, Kpifiavtj, and Kpij3avov 
for irXctKovg (Fragm. 62, Bergk., with the words quoted from Athenseus), 
but it mav have migrated to Greece from Asia Minor (Alkman himself 
was born at Sardis). From Greece or itaiy it was propagated through 
intermediate nations to the Germans, who handed it on to the 
Lithuanians and Slavs. We believe that libum was borrowed from 
the Greek, like puis {TtoXrog, already used by Alkman), massa (jua£a), 
placenta (TrXaKovvra), etc. The later expressions, " a loafoi bread," i.e., a 
bread of bread, Old Norse, ost-hleifr, a bread of cheese, are only instances 
of metonymy, like the Italian and French pane dizucchero,pain desucre, 
and in salt mines, " a bread of salt," etc. As hlaifs was named from 
the oven, so the far-spread Italian focaccia, already used by Isidore, 
and found again in Old and Middle German, Servian, Bulgarian, 
Russian, Magyar, Wallachian, Turkish, and Modern Greek, was 
called after focus, being a cake of bread baked hard in the hot ashes 
of the hearth (see Diez, Wbrterb. sub. v., and Miklosich, Fremdwbrter, 
p. 118). We believe that in our brod, bread, there lies the idea of 
leavened bread, of the dprog Zv/xir^g, such as, tied to the meat, was set 
before the guests at the banquet given by the Thracian king Seuthes 
to Xenophon {Anab. 7, 3). 

Quairnus, quern or hand-mill (in all Teutonic languages), lAth.girna, 
millstone, pi. girnos, mill, Slav, zhrunuvii (in all Slavic languages), 
also Old- Irish broon, broo, bro (b for g), is called after a circular move- 
ment, if we compare the Greek words : yvpog, crooked, bent (Odyss. 
19, 246), yvpog, circle, yvpeviv, to gyrate, yvpiog, round, yvpig, fine wheat- 
flour, Tvpai irhrpai (round sea-rocks like millstones). The long v after the 
y is reflected in the German qu ; quairnus and yvpig can have nothing 
to do with German korn, kern, Slav, zruno, Lith. zirnis, as the initial 
of these Slavic and Lithuanian words and the short vowel of the first 
syllable show. It was the heavy task of slaves, who could never be 
wanting among rude and warlike pastoral nations, to turn the primitive 
hand-mill. For this work there is a word common to the Germans 
and Slavs : Goth, arbaiths, Slav, rabotaj which, though it may have 
the same root as the Latin labos, yet in German and Slavic shows the 
same derivative suffix ; and perhaps the root itself is still preserved 
in the Slavic languages — rab, rob, slave. Men and maids, while they 
sat turning the upper millstone, accompanied their work with mill- 
songs ; the primitive custom of singing during all work that admits of 
it, still prevails among Russians, Bedouins, etc. The modern words, 
miihle, miiller, are in German, as in the other European languages, not 
derived from the native verb malan, to grind, but are borrowed from 



NOTES. 437 



the Latin ; in company with water-mills, and improved mechanical 
arrangements for grinding and cleaning corn, they spread from Italy 
throughout Europe. The flour produced from the primitive hand-mill 
was impure, and mixed with earth, and grated between the teeth ; and 
in this state the European traveller still finds it among distant bar- 
barians. 

The real Plough — constructed of several pieces, with an iron share, 
and after further development furnished with wheels — first became 
a necessity when, in the course of centuries, the ground became freer 
from stones and roots, and agriculture lost its nomadic and merely 
accessory character. From that period, when the north-eastern 
nations had partly advanced from their woods and pastures to the 
south-west, and partly received from that quarter many elements of 
culture, dates the Germano-Slavic word plough, Slav, filugu. The 
history of this word is pretty clear. In Pliny, 18, 172, we find the 
notice: "Id non ftridem inventum in Raetia Galliae, ut duas adder ent 
tali rotulas, quod genus vocant plaumorati." By the inhabitants of 
Gallic Rhsetia we must understand sub-Alpine husbandmen originally 
of Celtic origin, and the above appellation, though the reading is 
uncertain, and the form of word obscure, we may suppose to be the 
oldest name of the later plough. The Anglo-Saxons, who crossed to 
Britain in the fifth century, did not yet possess the word, which was 
first known in those islands in the eleventh century. But about the 
middle of the seventh century we find in the Longobardian Law — ed. 
Roth. 288 (293) — the following words : " De plovum. Si quis plovum 
{plobum) aut aratrum? etc. From Germany the word passed to the 
Slavs, when they, following as usual the example of the Germans, 
began to adopt the higher forms of agriculture. At the present time 
we find the plough in use among the Little Russians, but Great 
Russia still has the old hook-plough. How tough " natural " nations 
are, whose morals are formed by tradition, and whose whole thought 
consists of religious superstition, and what a hard matter it is to raise 
them but one step in civilization, we learn from the following notice 
in Herberstein's Rerum Moscoviticarum commentarii, de Lithuania : 
"The Lithuanians only cultivate their land with wooden ploughs, 
though the soil is rich and not sandy. When they go to work, they 
take several plough-beams with them, so that if one breaks, another 
may be at hand (Old Hesiod advises the same thing : & % srtpov y 
a%aig, trtpov k i-rrl flovai fldXoio). A certain governor of the province 
wished to teach them better methods, and sent for a large stock of 
iron ploughs. But as the harvest was bad the following year, the 
peasants attributed its failure to the iron implements, and were on 
the point of revolting ; the governor was obliged to withdraw his 
ploughs and consent to the rude old fashion again." 



438 NOTES. 



The Greek and the Roman names for the same grains are singularly 
unlike each other. Compare airog, nvpog, lud, H<pt], oXvpa, dXfira, 
aXdara, %idpa t x^^pog, npi/xvov, irirvpa, icdxpvg, etc., with triticum, ador 
(adj. adoreus for adoseus),far (gen. f arris for faresis, 'farina for farrina, 
farrago), panicum, siligo, pollen, alica, acus (gen. aceris for acesis), 
palea, furfur, etc. The same with the tools and apparatus; for example, 
the parts of a plough : ioTofiotvg, tx^rXr], vwig, tXvfia, compared with 
temo, stiva, bura, vomer; or Xuc/xog, XiKfxrjTrjp, tttvov, winnowing-shovel 
(all Homeric), Xikvov corn-fan (Hymn, in Merc, 21, 63, in the sense of 
cradle), akwj (Homeric), oXfiog, mortar for pounding grain, virepog, pestle 
(both in Hesiod, Op. et D., 423 : 

oXfiov fitv Tpnrodrjv rd\ivtiv, inrepov de rpiirr)X vv )i 

with v annus, evallere, area, pila, pilum, etc. The Latin expressions 
sarire, or sarrire, runcare, strigare, lira, porca, elix, colliciae, nietere, 
messis, rallum, rastrum, ligo, occa, irpex, crates, etc., are either 
wanting entirely in the Greek, or, at least, in this special shape and 
meaning. The Latin sarpere, sarmentum, agree with the Greek apirrj 
(and the Slavic sriipu), but point to a tool which may be older than 
agriculture ; how ctp-iSaXig and simila, similago, are related to each 
other, is obscure ; -kt'ioguv may be the same as pinsere, but it proves 
little : that dprog 3.nd panis (older form pane) do not agree is not to be 
wondered at in so late an invention as bread. It seems to us vain to 
try to deduce the original identity of Greek and Italian cultivation 
of the soil from their land-measuring. It has indeed been asserted 
that the vorsus of the Oscans and Umbrians, 100 feet square, corre- 
sponds to the Greek plethron (Mommsen, Die Unterital. Dialekte, 
p. 260); but xheplethron, like the foot and the stadion, was of Babylonian 
origin, and we do not know the original length of the Umbrian vorsus. 
If it was identical with that of the plethron, the measure can only have 
been derived from the Greeks or from the common Oriental source. 
13ut if the agreement only consists in the similar division into a hundred 
feet, it is clear that this, among nations in whose languages the decimal 
system prevailed, amounts to nothing. The Gallic candetum, as the 
name shows, was also measured by the number 100. Much more 
significant is the difference between the Roman and the Greek division 
of land. The Roman actus measures 120 feet, the acnua 120 square 
feet (Varro, De r. r., 1, 10, 2), a measurement on the duodecimal system, 
which was also Etruscan and perhaps Iberian. On the tablets of 
Heraklea on the Siris the customary land-measure, exoivog, contains 
30 dplypara of 4 feet each, therefore again 120 feet (Corp. Inscr. 
III. No. 5774,5775)- 



NOTES. 439 



Note 17, page 65. 

If fitXivrj, milium, was literally honey-fruit (Plin. 22, 131 : u Panicum 
Diodes medicus met frugum appellavit"), it must have meant sweet 
fruit of ears, mild vegetable food in general, in contrast with the 
bloody animal food of the Nomad. Call to mind the Homeric expres- 
sions : o'ltov re. yXvictpolo, oiTOio jieXitypovog, /xeXajSka, or fitXi<ppova 7rvpov, 
XwroZo fie\ii]cea tcapirov, rpuyeiv aypujcmv peXirjdsa. If it be SO, the Lith. 
malnos must be a borrowed word, for that is one of the languages that 
express honey with a d in the place of /. Millet — in what follows we 
do not distinguish milium from panicum, or Keyxpog from eXvfiog — is 
the food of the Iberian nations in the extreme west, and of Celts. In 
Aquitania — the land between the Pyrenees and the Garonne, inhabited 
by Iberians — there grew, as Strabo (4, 2, 1) assures us, hardly anything 
but millet. Pliny, 18, 101 : " Panicoet Galliae quidem,praecipue Aqui- 
tania utitur. Sed et Circumpadana Italia, addita faba, sine qua nihil 
conficiunt." Pytheas (in Strabo, 4, 5, 5) found that some inhabitants of 
the (Celtic) coasts visited by him fed on millet, others on vegetables 
(XaxavoiQ, beans ?) and roots (turnips ?). When Caesar besieged 
Massilia, the inhabitants lived on old millet and spoilt barley, which 
had been kept a long time in the State magazines (De Bello Civ., 2, 22 : 
" Panico enim vet ere at que ordeo cor r up to omnes alebantur, quod ad 
hujusmodi casus antiquitus paratum in publicum contulerant ") . Poly- 
bius reports of Gallic Italy, that he had seen with his own eyes an 
immense wealth of both kinds of millet (2, 15, 2 : 'EXvpov ye p.rjv ical 
Keyxpov reXewg vTrepfiaXXovaa SaipiXtta yiyvsTat nap' avrdlg) ; and Strabo 
says that, being well watered, the country was rich in millet, and could 
never suffer from famine, as that grain never failed (5, 1, 12 : Ian 
de Kai iceyxpo^opog dia<pepovriog dia rr\v evvSpiav' tovto de Xip,ov pkyiarov 
ianv a.Koc, 7rpbg uTravrag yap tcaipovg akpwv avrex^ Kai ovC£.ttot k7nXiiirtiv 
cvvarai, kclv tgv aXXov airov y'evrjTai <nravig) ; and also quite late, at the end 
of the Gothic kingdom in Italy, an order is issued during a famine that 
panicum shall be divided among the people out of the magazines of Tici- 
num and Dertona at a small price (Cassiod. Var. 12, 27). Farther to 
the east, the Alazones, a Scythian people on the Hypanis, sowed wheat, 
onions, garlic, beans and millet (Herod. 4, 17). In Thrace, the Ten 
Thousand, returning with Xenophon, marched along the Pontus to 
Salmydessus through the country of the millet-eaters, MeXivo<payoi, and 
in Demosthenes's time the subterranean granaries contained millet 
and oXvpa (Demosth. de Chersoneso, p. 100, ex. Phil. 4, 16). Pliny, 18, 
100. declares that millet porridge is the chief nourishment of the 
Sarmatians : ^ Sar mat arum quoque gentes hac maxumepulte aluntitrj' 
and that panicum is the favourite food of the Pontic peoples (101 : 



44 o NOTES. 



"Ponticaegentes nullum panico praefer tint cibum "). The Maeotians and 
Sarmatians live on millet, as the Athenians do on figs, and other folk 
on other things (ALL V. H. 3, 39 : BaXdvovg 'ApKaceg, 'ApyeToi tf cnriovg, 
'AOnvaloi Se ovica, Tipiv9coi de dxpddag deiirvov elxov t 'lv8oi icaXdfiovg, Kap/xavoi 
<poiviKag, iciyxpov de Mai&rai ical Sau/oo/tarai, repfxivQov de ical ndpdafiov 
Uepaai). In Pannonia, according to Cassius Dio, 49, 36, who was born 
there, millet and barley were the popular food, and Priscus, while on 
an embassy to Attila, was entertained exclusively with this grain 
(Miiller, Fragm. 4, p. 83). The Japodes, a mixed Celtic Illyrian race 
on the mountains of the Illyrian coast, lived on spelt and millet (Strabo 
7, 5, 4 : Zeia~ teal Keyxpv tcl iroXXd rpstyofievov). Among the classic nations, 
the millet, if indeed they had been acquainted with it before their 
separation in Pannonia and Illyria, fell into the background before 
other cereals ; only the Lacedaemonians, conservative in everything, 
were still called millet-eaters (Hesych. eXvfiog (nrspfia S expovrsg oX Adicwveg 
ioQiovoiv). The Germans, Lithuanians, and Slavs lived too far to the 
north for us to suppose that the cultivation of millet originated with 
them. And they had quite different names for it, Old High Germ. 
hirst, Slav, ftroso, Lith. soros, plur. of sora, millet-corn. When the 
Slavs moved into the region of the Danube, millet became a favourite 
with them, which it has never been with the Germans ; in modern 
North Italy it has been supplanted by rice and maize. From the above 
passages it will be seen that the bean (Lat. fada, Slav, bobii, Pruss. 
babo, Lith. pupa, Old Irish seib, where s has replacedyj Cambr.^tf for 
fab j see Grimm's Dictionary for the German bohne) accompanies 
millet ; as to the turnip (Gr. pd-rrvg, Lat. rdpa, raputn, Old Norse ro/a, 
Slav, repa, Lith. rope) we will add what Pliny says 18, 127 : "A vino 
atque messe tertius hie (the turnip) Transpadanis fructus? The high 
antiquity of the bean, especially of the field-bean, Vicia Faba, L., which 
is already mentioned in the Iliad (13, 589) under the name of Kva^iog, 
which stands related to the collat. form irvavog, irvaiiog, as the Old 
Latin, Sabine, and Faliscan haba to/aba (Mommsen, Unterital. Dial,, 
p. 358), is rendered probable by many circumstances ; for example, the 
part it played in antique worship ; but that it is nevertheless younger 
than the contented turnip, which thrives in the ashes of burnt brush- 
wood, seems to be proved by the language of the West Finns, in which 
the bean (Finn, papu, Esthon. ubba) has, like almost all objects of 
culture, borrowed an Indo-European name, while the turnip has a 
native word to itself (Finn, nauris, Esthon. naris, nairis, Carelian 
nagris). 

Note 18, page 67. 
The Potter's-Wheel is said to have been invented by Anacharsis the 



NOTES. 441 



Scythian, or, according to Theophrastus, by Hyperbios the Corinthian 
(Schol. to Pind. 01. 13, 27). As Corinth was a chief seat of Phoe- 
nician culture, there may be in the latter statement a hint as to the 
origin of the potter's art among the Greeks ; but the report, like almost 
everything in the Greek writings " concerning inventions," has very 
little historical value. The tyrant Kritias praises Kepa/xog (pottery), 
the son of wheel and earth and kiln, as an invention of his native city 
Athens (Fragm. 1, 12, Bergk. : 

rbv tie rpoxov yabig re Kafxivov r iKyovov evpev, 

KkuVOTClTOV KipCtflOV, Xphv-POV OIKOVOflOV, 

r) to KaXbv MapaQoJvi Karaar^aaaa Tpo7raiov). 

There was also an Attic demos, KepapsTg, whose members sacrificed 
to the hero Keramos. As earthen vessels, the burnt and the unburnt, 
those made by hand and those turned on the potter's wheel, are dis- 
tinguishable at the first glance, we must on this point refer our readers 
to the antiquarian excavators. 

The testimony of ancient languages seems to point to the practice 
of Weaving having existed before the separation and migration of the 
nations ; Greek hyphaino and our weave, Latin texere and Slav, tiikati, 
etc. If we were only certain that these words meant in primitive 
times the twistings of thread on the spindle, and real weaving on 
looms, and not merely a skilful knitting, plaiting, or sewing ! In 
plaiting mats out of the bast of lime-trees, with long and cross 
strips, a bone needle, to which the cross-strip was fastened, or a hollow 
bone through which it ran, etc., expressions might exist which were 
easily transferred to the warp, woof, shuttle, etc., when invented at a 
later period. Even now, in distant corners of Europe inhabited by a 
conservative people, weaving is carried on after the fashion of this 
primitive plaiting or knitting. It was witnessed by C. J. Graba in 
1828 among the inhabitants of the Faroe Isles, and lately by Franz 
Maurer among the Bosnians, Reise durch Bosmen, p. 266 : " They 
weave by hand without a shuttle, the cross-thread being passed through 
those that are stretched parallel by means of a long wooden needle, 
and then pressed home with a stick." 

Whoever is tempted to ascribe the knowledge of weaving to the 
primitive nations should remember that this art passed from very rude 
beginnings through a number of stages up to its perfection in historical 
times. How naturally does a modern loom, a flying shuttle, insinuate 
itself into the fancy of the comparative philologist ! For the rest, the 
Greek and the Latin words for the spindle, the loom, and the operations 
performed by them, are very dissimilar. On the one hand : drpaKTog, 
rjkcueaTri, kXwOuj, ijTpiov, ravuv, fiiTog (Horn. II. 23, 760 : 



442 NOTES. 



u)Q ore rig re yvvaucog Li>£wvoio 
ffTTjOtog tart Kavuv, ov-p tb fxdXa x^P* 71 ravvocry, 
-m\viov iZtkKOVoa Trapeic jj.itov, ayxoQi d' lax* 1 
(tttjQioq), 

KtpKig, Kp'zKiiv (in Sappho, Fr. 90, Brgk. : KpsKtjv tov Igtov), KpoKt], Accu- 
sative, KpoKo. (Hesiod, Op. et. D., 538 : 

(rrfjfiovi ff iv 7ravptf) noWr/v KpoKa pripvcraaOai), 

\(ttoq, orhfiiov (Lat. stamen, probably a Doric word borrowed), <nruQr) 
(Lat. spatha, borrowed late), avriov (in Aristophanes), dyvvBtg (stone- 
weights). On the other : Co/us, fusus, filum, glomus, jugiwi, radius, 
tela, trama, licium, etc. In Slavic the language of weaving has much 
that is remarkable : Krosno, loom, web (the same as tcpeictiv, KpoKrj, 
with the Slavic change of k into s), atuku, Russ. titok, woof, weft (from 
the verb tukati), nitt, thread (belongs to vku), vr)9<u, etc.), navoi (Lat. 
liciatorium), presti (nere), predeno (tela), preslica (fuscus), predivo 
(filum), vratilo, vreteno (quite the same as verticillus), briido, Russ. 
bei'do, South-Slav, brdo (pecten textorius, liciu?n), etc. The absence 
of these expressions in Lithuanian, proves that they cannot be very 
old, for the Lithuanian has independent names : udz's, web, austi, to 
weave, szeiwa, shuttle, giga, thread, mesh {nytis means the shaft of 
the loom), stdkles, the loom (a plural /, Slav, stanu), werpti, to spin, 
ivarpste, spool, spindle, drobe, linen, etc. The Old Slav, kadeli is 
perhaps only a corruption of the German kunkel, which itself is derived 
from the Latin colus. Everything shows that here we are on more 
modern ground. 

Note 19, page 67. 
That the names for Gold were different among the Greeks and 
Romans, and among the Lithuanians and Slavs respectively, is a proof 
of the late appearance of that metal in Europe. The Latin auricm, 
gold, and aurora, dawn, etc., were originally ausum, ausosa; the 
Etruscan Sun-god Usil makes it probable that the Etruscans had a 
name for gold similar to the Latin one. Strange to say, we find the 
same name at the other end of Europe ; Prussian ausis, Lithuanian 
auksas (with the frequent Lithuanian strengthening of the sound by 
placing a k before the s). How could the Italian name have reached 
the far northern sea but along the same route as the amber trade, 
which travelled the sacred road of the Etruscans from the Heliades 
and the Eridanus, at the head of the Adriatic, to the haffs and low- 
grounds of Prussia ? Instead of that name the Lettons use the Slavic 
word sells ; so at that time they already lived apart, in a place where 



NOTES. 443 



there was no amber, and which was not reached by Italian influences. 
The Ceits also received gold from Italy, but later than the Prussians, 
namely, at a time when ausum had already changed its s into r (Old 
Irish <?>, in the younger dialects our, eur, owr), great as was the 
delight that family of nations afterwards took in the glitter of gold 
ornaments. The Slavs and Germans have a common word : Gothic 
gulth, Slav, zlato, Russ. zoloto, which is of late origin, for the 
Lithuanians do not possess it, and it points, not to Italy, but to the 
Iranian world in the south-east. The Greek xP v<T °£> which may 
certainly be classed with the above forms, was more than a generation 
ago declared by Pott to be borrowed from the Phoenician, andRenan 
holds the same opinion (Max Mullens Mythologie comparee, p. 36 : 
" xpvabc, me par at le se7nitique kharous, qui aurait passe en Grece par 
le commerce des Phe'niciens, comme le mot fitraXkov" In fact, later 
discoveries of inscriptions have shown that kharus, which is only 
poetical in Hebrew, was the common Phcenician expression for gold. 
It was by slow degrees that gold found its way into the wildernesses 
of Europe and Turanian Asia ; their cupidity once awakened, led to 
digging up the native soil for hidden treasure. The Western Finns 
call gold by its German name ; the tribes of the Volga and Ural, 
among them the Magyars, use none but Iranian (Massagetian, Herod. 
1,215) words ; so young and misleading is the legend of the far North- 
east being the land of gold. 

With regard to Silver, the European nations are also divided into 
groups : Germans, Lithuanians, and Slavs have one name for the 
metal, Greeks and Romans another ; which last sounds like an echo 
from Asia, while the former (Goth, silubr, Slav, srebro, Pruss. siraplis) 
reminds one vividly of the Homeric Alybe in the Pontus (for Halybe, 
and this for S alybe?), oBiv dpyvpov IvtI ytvkOXj]. The Semitic languages 
also differ greatly in the names of silver ; it is singular that the 
Syrians, and then the Persians, altogether ceased to use them, adopt- 
ing instead the Greek aer?//zo£ (uncoined) in the form sem, stm. 



Note 20, page 67. 

As the knowledge of metal usually affords a principal basis for 
classification in theories about the so-called Lake Dwellings, we take 
this opportunity to say a few words on these remains of ancient human 
existence. And first of all let me remark, that it is not well to try 
and guess the primitive history of European mankind from any isolated 
point of view ; it only leads to baseless fancies. But our grave- 
searchers, with their " three periods," often knew very little of ancient 
ethnography and traditional history ; on the pure ethnologists, with 



444 NOTES. 



their "races of man," the light of comparative philology had not 
dawned ; comparative philologists have not always taken into account 
the facts and possibilities of the history of culture ; theologizing 
primitive historians did not take the trouble, or did not dare, to ascer- 
tain critically the historical value of the documents they quoted. 
Now, as to the pile-dwellings in lakes and marshes, it is not true that 
history is altogether silent about them. Hippocrates {De aere, loci's 
etc, 22, p. 268, Ermerius) reports of the Colchians, that they had erected 
their dwellings of wood and rushes in the midst of the waters : rd r* 
oiKrjfiaTa %v\iva Kai KaXdjxiva Iv roiai vdacri /j,ffij]xctvr]fjisva. These Col- 
chians are the people called by others Moovv-omoi, i.e., dwellers in 
wooden towers (poowoi, noawzg, also with double a). It is true that we 
are not certain to which family of nations these Colchians belonged. 
But that Indo-European races were no strangers to this kind of archi- 
tecture is proved by the remarkable report of Herodotus, 5, 16, on the 
Paeonians in Thrace, a passage which the world had had before it more 
than two thousand years before old piles at Meilen on Lake Zurich, 
together with new " strata of culture," were disclosed to our astonished 
eyes. "The Paeonians," says the father of history, "live on piles 
in Lake Prasias ; whoever takes a wife — and they marry more than 
one — has to drive in three piles, for which the neighbouring mountain 
forest furnishes the material ; the piles support a deck ; on this deck 
every one has his hut (icaXvftti), trap-doors open on to the lake, and a 
narrow bridge leads to the land ; the little children are tied by the 
foot, so as not to fall into the water ; horses and domestic animals are 
fed with fish, for the lake has such an abundance that you need only 
let a bucket down through the trap-door to pull it up again full of 
fish " — evidently because of the plentiful nourishment afforded by the 
offal. Now, as the Thracians in many of their customs have a 
decidedly northern look, why should not the lakes in Central Europe 
also have been inhabited in a similar manner at that time ? All the 
more because, at a time when Europe was hardly anything but one 
great forest, and rivers and lakes offered natural highways and 
halting-places, such pile-dwellings, with approaches that could easily 
be cut, offered to the men of that day something like the security 
that the fortresses of Mantua and Comorn do now. It is certain 
that the very ancient towns of Spina and Atria in the district about 
the mouths of the Po, as well as the habitations of the Veneti, which 
rose in the midst of waters and marshes (Strabo, 5, 1, 5 : to>v dk 
7r6\iiov ai fiev vqaiZovm, al & Ik /xepovg xXv^ovrai), were in the same way 
built upon piles. Ravenna, in quite historical times, gives us a picture 
of this condition of things. It was built entirely of wood, and pene- 
trated with canals ; traffic took place by means of bridges and 



NOTES. 445 



gondolas (Strabo, I, 1,6 : ZvkoTrayriQ oXt] icai diappvrog, ytcpvpaig icai Tro(j9fxiioiQ 
odivo/iEVT)) ; all the dwellings rested on piles (Vitruv. 2, 9, 11 : "Est 
autejn maxime id considerare Raven7iae, quod ibi omnia opera et 
publica et privata sub fundamentis ejus generis habentpalos "), namely, 
of alder-wood, which was indestructible under ground ; the buildings 
themselves were of larch-wood, which was brought down the river 
Po, and was said to defy fire. Like Ravenna, Altinum was also 
nothing but an improved pile-village ; and the same art and habitude 
caused at first small settlements, and then the splendours of Venice, 
to rise in the lagoons at the mouth of the Brenta. Caesar found the 
banks of the Thames guarded by pointed stakes, and the same kind 
of stakes stuck in the river, covered by the water {De B. Gall., 12, 18: 
" Ejusdemque generis sub aqua defixae sudes fiumine tegebantur "). 

It is not surprising that, among the remains of these edifices be- 
longing to the most different points of the Indo-European region, there 
should be found some that contain only stone tools. Though the 
immigrant shepherds were acquainted with metal in the form of 
copper, as is proved by comparing the Sansk. qyas, Zend, ayank, 
Latin aes, Goth, aiz, Old Irish tarn for isarn, they certainly did not 
manufacture it into tools, but used stone weapons ; this is confirmed, 
among other things, by words like hamar and sahs (Grimm, " Teut. 
Myth.," 181). Then, according to their position in the long string of 
nations, the different races sooner or later received from the South 
knives and swords of bronze — that is, mixed copper and tin ; but it 
would be altogether contrary to experience and nature to suppose 
that this change took place suddenly. It must have been centuries 
before the stone axe gave way to the bronze knife in war and hunting, 
in the felling and splitting of trees, in the slaughtering of animals, etc., 
and at last became entirely obsolete. Custom, inherited skill and 
practice, the example of ancestors, myths and religious superstition, 
and the natural dulness of primitive folk, were all in favour of stone 
and bone implements ; and the few bronze swords that found their 
way into the interior must have been for a long time only toys and 
ornaments of single chiefs. When Caesar landed in Britain he found 
bronze and iron bars of a certain weight used instead of money (5, 12 : 
" Utuntur aut aere aut taleis ferreis ad certum pondus exa?ninatis pro 
nummo") — that is, a period still surviving there, which was extinct in 
continental Gaul, where money had long been coined ; the island, 
though rich in tin and other metals, received its iron from abroad 
{aere utuntur importato) ; and the tribes in the interior, having for the 
most part no agriculture, feeding on flesh and milk, and clothed in 
skins, would probably make no use of metal. In the north of Ger- 
many and Slav-land the stone age reached far into really historical 



446 



NOTES. 



times, and, in single cases, even touched on the age of gunpowder. 
Considering all this, it seems not too venturesome to suppose that the 
inhabitants, even of those Swiss lake-dwellings which have hitherto 
yielded only stone implements, but at the same time proofs of agricul- 
ture being practised, were of Celtic— nay, of specially Helvetic race ; 
that the inhabitants of the lake-dwellings in the Emilia were Umbrians, 
either independent or subject to the Etruscans ; that those of the 
Mecklenburg lake-dwellings were Goths, and so on. The only new 
thing that has been brought out by the discovery of the lake-dwellings 
—that is, the only circumstance that could not perhaps have been 
established with such certainty by history alone— is the priority of 
agriculture to the metals, and indeed of a tolerably advanced agricul- 
ture, with several varieties of barley and wheat, with flax harvested 
and neatly tied up in bundles, fruit of trees, etc. If we have made 
no mistakes in observation, and if later discoveries do not upset the 
results hitherto obtained, it would stand proved that the metallurgy 
of the civilized world of the Mediterranean penetrated very late into the 
region of L. Constance, at any rate later than settled abodes and the 
cultivation of corn and flax. A significant legend related by Pliny, 
12, 5, seems to indicate that the art of forging metals came to the 
Gauls from Italy, at the same time with the knowledge of wine and 
oil, or not long before the great invasions of Bellovesus and Sigovesus. 
A Helvetian citizen named Helico (evidently a representative name), 
after residing at Rome to learn the art of forging metals— fabrilem ob 
artem — brought home from there a dried grape and fig, as well as a 
quantity of the best oil and wine ; and this incident impelled the 
Gauls to cross the Alps and invade Italy. As the invasion took place 
towards the year 400 B.C. (Zeuss, Die Deutschen, p. 165. Contzen, 
Die Wanderungen der Kelten, p. 102, etc. ; the earlier dating of Livy, 
whom Ottfried Miiller and M. Duncker, Origines Germanicae, p. 14, 
were inclined to believe, is contradicted by Herodotus, who knows 
nothing yet of any Celts in Italy), the introduction of Italian metal- 
work would fall somewhere in the preceding one hundred years — say 
about a century after the founding of Massilia — the corn-cultivating 
stone age would lie beyond that. We know of nothing that history or 
the history of culture can say against that. Anyhow, when the Celts, 
after their great warlike migration to the East, gained settled habita- 
tions along the Alps, they became masters in smith-work ; they were 
the forging "dwarfs" who provided the Germans and the whole North 
with swords, kettles, etc. The Noric iron was celebrated, and it is 
not surprising that several Teutonic words seem to betray a Celtic 
origin — words such as eiseti, iron (Goth, eisarn, with the Celtic suffix 
-arna, see Schleicher in Hildebrand's Jahrbiicher^ 1, p. 410) ; as beil, 



NOTES. 447 



bill, axe (Old Irish Mail, Old Cornish bahell, see Zeuss, ed. 2, 1061) ; 
as the Old High German ger, spear, consequently Goth, gais (the 
Celtic TaiaaToi, spearmen, see Zeuss, ed. 2, 53 ; the word is also Iranic, 
see Justi, p. 98, and perhaps came from an Iranian people) ; as briinne 
(Goth, brunjo, Slav, briinya, from the Old Irish bruinne, breast, belly, 
see Zeuss, ed. 2, 1058, brii, gen. bronn, see Stockes, Ir. GL, No. 647, like 
panzer, coat of mail, Ital. panciera, from pantex, paunch). Nothing 
roams so easily as weapons and the names of weapons. 



Note 21, page 69. 

A beautiful passage in Euripides' Bacchce, 274, praises the gifts of 
Demeter and Bacchus, i.e. t bread and wine, as the best possessions of 
the human race. 

Note 22, page 70. 

We can build very little on the passage in the Iliad, 7, 467, where 
Euneos — that is, the good sailor, the son of Jason — sends ships laden 
with wine from the Isle of Lemnos to the Greek camp, which take in 
exchange for their oIvoq bronze and iron, skins, oxen, and slaves, while 
the two Atridae receive for their own share a thousand measures of 
fieQv, because the later origin of this passage is evident. The word 
dvdpdirodov belongs to Attic prose ; Euneos, the Jasonid, is taken 
from Iliad 23, 747, etc. The distinction therefore between oIvoq and 
jxkQv is also without value. 

Note 23, page 70. 

Maron himself is nothing but a mythic personification of the 
Ciconian town of Ismaros, which, with the omission of the s before m, 
and the addition of a suffix, was also called Maroneia, while a neigh- 
bouring lake bore the name of Ismaris (Herod. 7, 109). The son of 
the Thracian Eumolpus — adturam vitium et arborum {invenit) 
Ewnolfius Atheniensis, Pliny 7, 199 — was called Ismarus or, with 
assimilated s and a genealogical suffix, Immaradus. The names 
Ismaros, Ismaris, Immaradus, Maron, and Maroneia, contain inte- 
resting hints as to the laws of sound and of word-formation among the 
Thracians, and particularly the Ciconians. 

Note 24, page 71. 

So we interpret (3ovTr\rjZ here, and not as a goad for driving oxen 
The bill, that primitive weapon derived from the ston©~axe, and still 



448 



NOTES. 



bearing its form, is in a fighting sense always the attribute of a 
barbarian {Annali delV instihito arch., pp. 339, 340, 1863). It is rare 
as a weapon in Homer ; certainly in Book 15 of the Iliad the Trojans 
and Acbaeans fight— 

6%koi St) TreXsKsvm ical a'i'ivt]<n (v. 7 11 ) > 

but that is at the ship, which Hector has already grasped and hopes 
to set on fire, therefore man to man, hacking at each other as they 
would at timber or a sacrificial animal. And the Trojan Pisander 
once makes a stroke at Menelaus with the d^ivrj, but is killed by him 
with the sword (II. 13, 611). 



Note 25. page 72. 

It is not venturing too much to suppose that Semele, as a Thracian 
word, meant Earth, Earth-goddess. The root to which %a/*o«, the 
Latin humus, etc., belong, begins with a sibilant in Zendic, Lithuanian, 
and Slavic (zemi, zemlia, etc.). In the same way the Thracian and 
Phrygian Sabos, Sabazios, the Macedonian 2a.va.dai in Hesychius, etc., 
reappear in a surname of Dionysus, "Tijg or "Yeig, the humid, fruit- 
briiiging, whose nurses too are the Hyades. There exists a Sabazios 
Hyes ; and Semele herself is called Hye by Pherecydes. Sabos and 
"Ti]Q are letter for letter the same word. 

Note 26, page 72. 

The (3i(3\ivog oIvoq in Hesiod, Op. et D., 589, would lead to the same 
conclusion, in so far as it is derived now from Thrace, now from 
Naxos ; Steph. Byz. : BifSX'ivr], %wpa Gpa/a/f* cnro Tavrrjg 6 BiflXivog olvog, 
jt de cnrb Bi/3Xiag a}nrkXov, "Sfjfiog 8' 6 ArjXiog tov Na£iov <pi]cnv, IttuSt] Na£ot 
-Korafiog Bi[3\og. If the name is derived from the Phoenician town of 
Byblus (Phoenician Gybl, that is, height, Hebrew Gobel, the town of 
the Giblites), as is indicated by a verse of Archestratus in Athen., i. 
p. 28: 

Tbv & airb Qoiviiajg ipag, tov fivfiXivov, aivw, 

then the variants (3i>{3\ivog and (3i/3\ivog are both correct, as the Phoenician 
vowel can be rendered either way ; not far lies the nasalized form 
(SLufiXivog (in Hesychius). It is remarkable that we come across this 
wine afterwards in Sicily and South Italy ; it occurred in Epicharmus ; 
Theocritus mentions it (14, 15); the historian Hippys of Rhegium 
related that it was transplanted from Italy to Syracuse {Athen., i. p. 81) ; 
and finally it is found on the first of the two Herakleote tables, if the 



JVOT£S. 449 



expressions a (3v(3\ia and rdv (3v(3\ivav fiaaxaXav are correctly explained 
by Mazochi, the editor and explainer of the inscription, as meaning 
" Byblic vine-plantation" (the Corp. Inscr. III., Nos. 5774 and 5775 
agrees with him : " Recte videtur Mazochins a vitis genere ex Byblo 
Phoenicia repete?ido derivare, unde etiam (3v(3\ivog olvog "). However it 
does not seem to us probable that this name goes back to such a 
remote, long-vanished antiquity, or that it contains a reminiscence of 
the Byblian, which were the earliest of all the Phoenician colonies. It 
might be less fanciful to suppose a reference to the Byblus material, 
for Homer is acquainted with the same adjective (3v(3\lvoq ; he applies 
it (Od. 21, 391) to a ship's rope, which was therefore made of papyrus- 
bast. It remains to be asked, how a kind of wine could be named 
from that material ? Were the grapes dried on byblus mats and then 
pressed, yielding a kind of straw- wine, vinum passum? or did the vines 
climb up ropes of byblus, as in the neighbourhood of Brundusium in 
Italy at the time of Varro ? The latter supposition would be supported 
by the words of Hippys of Rhegium, in Athen. i. p. 31 : 'l-mrlag (so he 
is called here) de 6 'Prjylvog rr\v d\i.bv Ka\ovjiivi]v a/nreXov Bifikiav <pr}oi 
KciXtiaQai. Or were the vines tied to their props with byblus bands, so 
that the grapes could develop more freely ? Grotefend, in the Annali 
deW inst., vii. p. 275, and after him Gottling, derive also the Etruscan 
name of Bacchus, Fufluns, from (3v(3\ivog ; Corssen, in his Sprache der 
Etrusker, 1, 314, rejects this combination, as a Greek and Latin initial 
b is represented by p, never by/ What the real facts were about the 
Pramnian wine, which served for mixing, and is twice mentioned by 
Homer (II. 11, 638 ; Od. 10, 235), and whether that name signified a 
species of grape, or a mode of preparation, or a district, and if so, what 
district ? was evidently as little known by later expositors as what the 
(3ifi\tvog really was — although there is no want of conjectures and 
assertions (see particularly, Athen. i. p. 30), and this Pramnian wine 
is now and then mentioned in the post-Homeric time, for example, by 
the Comic poet Ephippus : 

<pik& yt TrpajAviov olvov \ka(5iov 

{Athen. i. p. 28). In remembering the Thracian, or properly Paeonian, 
mixed drink 7rapa(3irj y brewed from millet with the addition of Kovvty, 
mentioned by Hecataeus, we are tempted to suppose that the adjective 
Pramnian was only another form of the same Thracian or Phrygian 
word. 

Note 27, page 74. 

If olvoc, vinwn, belonged, as Pott supposed, to the same root as 
viere, vitis, vitex, vhnen, vitta, irea, Irug, etc., the Greeks and Latins 

2g 



450 



NOTES. 



must have formed their name for wine out of a native root meaning to 
twine, by means of a participial n. But when we consider (i) that the 
beverage, both by the many processes of which it is the final result, 
and in its effects and properties, stands too far away from the plant 
itself to be named from its climbing nature ; (2) that in the spread of 
this culture from one nation to another, the finished product is always 
introduced first and called by its foreign name, and the cultivation is 
not learnt till later — after which such words as olw], olvag, oivapov, etc., 
can be formed easily enough ; (3) that the similarity of the Semitic 
name (yain, wain) can only be explained by supposing that the Greeks 
received the name together with the thing ; it is more than probable 
that vinum only accidentally resembles vitis, that the former is a 
foreign word, the latter a native one with the meaning of " flexible 
plant " (see below, note 46). The Germans also borrowed the word 
for wine, but called the vine by a German word (O. H. G. repd). 
Curtius, No. 594, says : "Why the fruit of the vine should not originally 
have been called after the vine, is more than I can make out. The 
Lithuanian word offers a most striking analogy " (namely, apvynys, 
hop-tendril, plu. apvynei, hops). The analogy would be striking if in 
any language beer was named from the ■prickly nature of the barley- 
ear ; as it is, that Lithuanian transition of meaning is much the same 
as is seen in avizas, oat-corn, plu. avizos, oats, and a hundred similar 
cases. Besides, vinum is not even alleged to be derived from vitis, 
vine, which might be thought possible, but immediately from a root 
meaning simply to twine. 

Mommsen also, founding on a supposed affinity in the Sanskrit, 
thinks it probable that the primitive race migrating into Italy brought 
the vine with them (in several parts of his Roman History, especially 
1, 173, of the second edition). But, as the cultivation of vines pre- 
supposes a very high degree of domiciliation, it is not reconcilable 
with the habits of a wandering horde. At the stage of warlike pastoral 
life, migration in mass is natural ; at an advanced stage of agriculture, 
with property in the soil, and durable houses, it is extremely rare and 
only possible under very special circumstances ; where trees and vines 
are cultivated, it is wholly inconceivable. Regard the Britons or 
Germans of Caesar, their breeding of cattle, their incipient, half-nomadic 
agriculture, their food consisting of milk and flesh, their clothing of 
skins, etc. Can it be imagined that they could have cultivated vines, 
which need so much provident care, and so many appliances of civili- 
zation ? They, who probably planted only spring-corn, for winter- 
sowing supposes too much of plan and calculation (Roscher, Ansichten 
der Volksivirthschaft, Leipzig and Heidelberg, 1861 ; Ueber die Land- 
ivirthschaft der dltesten Deutschen, p. 75. Yon Sybel, Kleine historische 



NOTES. 451 



Schriften, p. 35, 1863), could they have meddled with vine-shoots, that 
only bear fruit after many years ? And surely the wandering folk that 
invaded Italy had reached no higher stage of culture than the earliest 
Germans of history, but rather a lower ; they brought with them cattle, 
swine, and stone axes, but assuredly no vines. The difference in the 
development of the great national groups of Europe only consists in 
their earlier or later entrance on particular phases of culture ; the 
Greeks received their impulse from the East, the Italians from the 
Greeks ; the Celts turned their attention to agriculture, and the building 
of towns, roads, and bridges, centuries later than the Graeco- Italian 
nations, from whom they learnt much ; again centuries afterwards, the 
Germans did the same, having meanwhile experienced the civilizing 
influence of the Celts ; still later the Slavs, under the constant educating 
influence of the Germanic West. Make every allowance for difference 
of race and climate ; yet climate itself imposes a gradual advance of 
the vine from the south-east, and forbids any idea of its having come 
down from beyond the Alps. We admit that, from the point of view 
of Roman documents and traditions, the cultivation of the vine in Italy 
looks very old ; the only question is, how old ? For the establishment 
of the Roman ritual, and for Italy in general — as seen from Rome — 
the period of Greek influence is quite an ancient, indeed a primitive, 
period. If the ancestral god of the Sabines, Sancus, was imagined as 
a vine-dresser, viti-sator, with a bent sickle, yet these same Sabines 
professed to be descended from Sabus the Lacedaemonian ! 

Note 28, page 75. 

The Greek word KafiaZ, (already used by Homer and Hesiod) only 
meant the light, reed-like rod or pole along which the vines climbed, 
or were led from tree to tree ; the vineyard on the shield of Herakles 
in Hesiod (v. 897) swings, with leaves and Ka.fj.aKsg, hither and thither : 

aeiofitvog (pvWoim ko.1 dpyvpeyat Kafxa^i' 

and the forriieu in the corresponding verse of the Iliad 18, 563 : 

e<TTr]Ku 5k KCLfia^L diafXTrspeg dpyvpeymv — 

only means that canes were stuck in the ground in continuous rows to 
support the vines. And the later name x<*P a Z (from which Diez thinks 
the French echalas is derived), really a pointed cutting of a plant, was 
used originally in the sense of cane or shoot ; the xdpaKtg, for 
example, which the five rich Corcyraeans in Thucydides (3, 70) are said 
to have cut from the grove of Zeus and Alcinous, can only have been 
twigs, for when the culprits had to pay a stater for each, the fine was 



45 2 NOTES. 



thought excessive ; and not many poles could have been cut down un- 
observed in a consecrated grove. The true Greek name for vine-pole 
would be ttjj^oc or tti)Uv (corresponding to the Lat. pedare vineam, 
pedamenium, pedum, the shepherd's-staff, etc., only with a lengthened 
root-vowel, like the Goth, fotus, foot), but this word never became 
developed ; it appears in Homer with the meaning, foot-end (blade) 
of an oar ; in the passage (II. 5, 838) where the beech-wood axle is 
spoken of, there is an old reading irifiivog instead of <pr\yivog (see 
Eustath. on the passage) ; and in Theophrastus, h.pl., 5, 7, 6, Schnei- 
der has from manuscripts restored -n-Tjdog for the tree that axles and 
ploughs are made of (see Schneider on Theophrastus, h. pi., 4, 1, 3). 

If the CEnotrians were named after the vine-poles, the name of the 
oldest grape in Italy, the vitis Amincea or Aminea, points in a singu- 
lar manner to the Peucetians, a kindred nation to the CEnotrians. 
Philargyr. ad Virg. G. 2, 97 : " Aristoteles in Politiis scribit Amineos 
Thessalios fuisse, qui suae regionis vites in Italiam transtulerint, atque 
illis hide nomen impositum." To this we add the gloss of Hesychius : 
j) yap TLsvkstLcc 'A^ivaia Xkyerai. Also, according to Macrobius (Sat. 2» 
20, 7), the Aminean grape was called after a certain district : u Aminea, 
scilicet e regione, nam Aminei fuerunt ubi nunc Falernum est." Galen 
in two passages places the Aminean wine, which he calls watery, v^arw^c, 
and light, XnrrSg, in the neighbourhood of Naples (De niethodo mede?idi, 
12, 4 : o ts 'NscnroXiTrjg 6 'Afiivaiog, iv rolg rrspl ~Nea7ro\iv xwpioig yevofxtvog* 
De antid., I, 3 : r« kv N£rt7rdXei Kara rovg viroKH}ikvovg avry \6<povg, 
'A/MvaTog fiev ovo/jLa^ofiEvog k. r. X.). Accordingly Voss, in the passage 
just quoted from Macrobius, corrected Falernum into Salernum (in 
which Val. Rose, Arist. pseudepigr., p. 467, seems to agree with him),, 
and supposed that the Peucetia of Hesychius meant the country of the 
Picentines south-east of Naples. But the Aminean grape was quite 
at home in Campania proper. When Varro calls the vitis A.minea also 
Scantiana (De r. r., 1, 58, Pliny 14, 47), this word must be derived from 
the silva Scantia, which lay in Campania. In ancient as in modern 
times the vine in Campania was trained high on the trees, and the 
Aminean vine was a decided vitis arbustiva. This is plainly proved 
by the descriptions of Columella, 3, 2, 8-14, and Pliny, 14, 21, and by 
directions in the Geoponica, 4, 13, 5, 17, 2, 5, 27, 2. So the Aminean 
grape might originally belong to the district in which Aminean wine 
grew in Galen's time. Afterwards, it is true, the Peucetians, the fir- 
folk, were imagined as living in another place ; but the name is an 
appellative, with which the idea of woods and trees was associated, 
and in Cicero's time Campania did not want for woods, as is proved,, 
not only by the above-mentioned Scantia, but by the silva Gallinaria 
on the R. Volturnus, a wood of firs that still exists. Its Thessalian 



NOTES. 453 



origin means no more than that this grape goes back to the oldest 
time of the Greek settlement. Again, when we read in Hesychius 
fiopyiov' ddog dfnreXov, and call to mind the kind of grape named Mur- 
gentinum by Cato, we find the Morgetes, whose name seems formed 
from the measure of land apportioned (iitipofiai, fioipa, with the i 
thickened into g), connected with the cultivation of the vine. Much 
antiquity is to be found in the numerous names for different kinds of 
grapes. The name of the visula, for example, is probably founded on the 
Greek dlaog, oiaog, olaov, ulcrva (the Adj. oiavivog already used by Homer), 
Fr. osier, Bret, oazil. Might the spio?iia or spinea, which was native 
to the district about the mouths of the Po, be derived from the Greek 
xplvofiat, tyivag, as it would be too bold to think of the time-honoured 
city of Spina? 

It is remarkable how the various methods of planting and nursing 
the vine according to the district have been retained from early anti- 
quity down to the present day. In Provence the vine is trained now 
just as it was by the Phocseans ; the similar Catalonian method is 
derived from the settlements of the Massaliotes ; in Tuscany and the 
Campagna of Naples, south of the Volturno, the vine grows on tall 
elms and poplars ; in Lombardy it twines in festoons (rumpi, traduces) 
on small elder-trees (o/>ulus, the same as ftopulus in the Celtic pro- 
nunciation, with initial^ dropped, as in af/n'r=pa.ter, t'asg=ipiscis, etc.) ; 
in the Alpine valleys it forms wide bowers upborne by columns — all 
just as it was in the time of Varro, Pliny, and Columella. Unger and 
Kotschy, in Die Insel Cypern, p. 449, describe the cultivation of the 
vine in the Levant : " The young vine has to live, bear grapes, and 
ripen them, without support, for whence are the wooden props to come 
which lighten the weight of the fruit in our vineyards ? There is no 
material for such support, either in the Ionian Isles, in all Greece, 
Syria, and Palestine, or in this island (Cyprus). Whoever travels in the 
East where the vine cannot obey its natural impulse and crown the 
tree-tops, gets used to seeing it a planta humifusa in the deepest 
dejection and slavery." 

Note 29, page 79. 

Portugal experienced something very similar as late as the second 
half of the eighteenth century. That country, fallen into the deepest 
economical distress, had no source of profit save in the production of 
wine ; and vine plantations, on favourable soil and on unfavourable, 
had supplanted agriculture throughout the land. The minister 
Pombal gave orders to uproot the vines and sow corn in whole districts, 
especially in the valley of the Tagus. The order was executed, for 
the masterful reformer brooked no contradiction. Other paternal 



454 



NOTES. 



governments have aimed at the same objects by less startling methods, 
by screwing up taxes, by bounties, prohibitions, and differential duties. 
How young after all are the elementary notions of National Economy, 
which will one day be extolled as the greatest benefactress of mankind ! 



Note 30, page 80. 

Strabo tells us of a singular precursor of Islam among the Getae (7, 
3, 11). This people, like the Scythians and Thracians, and afterwards 
the Slavs, was notorious for its drunken habits, which prevented all 
political or warlike development. But, not long before the time of 
Strabo (or, as Jornandes 11 reports after Dio Chrysostomus, during 
the dictatorship of Sulla), there arose among them a magician of the 
name of Decaeneus, who had travelled much in Egypt and there learnt 
the art of prophecy, and who gained an extraordinary influence over 
his countrymen. They obeyed him so blindly that, at his behest, they 
uprooted all the vines in the country and thenceforward lived without 
wine. This occurred during the reign of King Bcerebista, who, with 
the intention of making his people brave, followed the same method, 
and, victorious on all sides, actually founded a mighty Getic empire, 
until parties rebelled against him and the Getic power again declined. 
Whether the virtue of temperance endured longer, and whether 
Decaeneus, like Mohammed afterwards, allowed or even favoured 
polygamy in compensation for the prohibited wine, is not stated. 
The Thracians, Getae, and Dacians were a race of unbridled sensuality, 
which, however, as Mullenhoff remarks (article Geive in the Encyclo- 
paedia), was checked from time to time by an ascetic reaction nourished 
by a belief in ghosts. 

Note 31, page 82. 

The Provencal and French word tona, tonne, which is also found in 
the Wallachian, and has passed into all the Celtic and Germanic 
tongues, but is characteristically wanting in Italian, must be derived 
from one of the Alpine languages, either the Ligurian or the Rhaetian. 
In Latin and Italian there is a word with another root-vowel — Una, 
wine-tub. Strabo says, that in Cisalpine Gaul, besides pitch-boileries 
(in the wooded spurs of the Alps), there were used immense wooden 
casks, as big as houses, to hold the wine (5, 1, 12 : to d'o'ivov to ir\r}6og 
H7)vvov(siv o\ ttiBoi' 01 ZuXivoi yap ptiZovg o'ikiov ii<t'i). Further (5, 1, 8), that 
the Illyrians brought their wine from Aquileia in wooden casks, inl 

ZvXlvwv iriQwv. 

With the wooden vessels appeared another far-spread word, daube, 
stave, dauge, etc., which runs through all the Romance and Slavic 



NOTES. 455 



languages, and is not wanting in the Magyar, Albanian, Wallachian, 
and Modern Greek. Diez traces all existing forms of the word to a 
Low-Latin doga, which itself was derived from the Greek Soxv- The 
word has passed into the Germanic languages only here and there, 
but flourishes abundantly in the Slavic both as to forms and meanings ; 
being, for instance, applied to the rainbow (see Miklosich, Die Fremd- 
wbrter in den Slav. Spr., p. 83), whence, as a derivative adjective, it 
gets the meaning of many -coloured. The centre of diffusion for this 
word is the wooded regions of the Danube, and there too the thing 
was native ; but it is quite possible that it was derived from a Graeco- 
Latin expression, perhaps used in the technical and commercial 
-language of Aquileia. To this day the wood that is used for the 
barrels sent to the East comes mostly from Hungary, and the hoops 
made of corylus Pontica are imported by way of Constantinople. 

A third expression, much used in the richly-wooded Romance 
countries, and far-spread on every side, is cupa, originally a Greek 
word {Kvirt]). When Maximin, in the year 238, was about to besiege 
Aquileia, but could not get his army over a tearing rain-swollen river, 
he was assisted by the extensive wine-trade of the place, for he found 
a quantity of large empty wine barrels, of which he built a bridge 
(Herodian, 8, 4, 9 : virefiaXov tiviq tojv tixvikwv, ttoWcl Civai icsva oivo<popa 
GKi.vr\ iripuptpovg %v\ov Iv rolg Iprj/xoig aypoig, olc sxpuvTO jxkv Trporepov 01 
KctTOiKovvTZQ lig v7rrjpe<Tiav iavTuJv ical Trapairkixiriiv tov olvov d(7(paXwg rolg 
deofisvoig). Jul. Capitolinus, reporting the same event, calls these 
enormous casks cupce (Maximin. 22 : " Ponte itaque cupis facto, Maxi- 
minus fluvium transivit, et de proximo Aquileiam obsidere coepW). 
The Massilians must also have possessed such barrels, for when 
Caesar besieged their town, they rolled them, filled with burning tar 
and pitch, down from the walls upon the enemy's trenches (De B. Civ., 
2, 1 1 : " Cupas taeda acpice refertas incendunt, easque de muro in mus- 
culum devolvunt"), just as the inhabitants of Uxellodunum in Aquitania 
had done before in a smaller case (De B. Gall., 8, 42 : u Cupas sevo, 
pice, scandulis complent; eas ardentes in opera provolvunt"). From the 
island near Salona, where the poet Lucan makes the Caesarians to be 
blockaded, these try to get away to the Illyrian mainland by night on 
rafts made of empty wine-barrels (4, 420 : " Namque ratem vacuae 
sustentant undique cupae"); of which, in that vine-country, where the 
mountains were still covered with forest, there must have been plenty. 
The workman who furnished the vine-dressers and merchants with 
such cupae was a cuparius, as we see, for example, from an inscription 
at Treves — Orelli, No. 4176 : " Cuparius et saccarius" (a man who also 
made sacks, and therefore worked for the freight-trade in general). 
Among the barbarians the cupa was also used for beer ; and we learn 



456 



NOTES. 



from various passages in the Roman law-books that it was also used to 
hold corn and flour. The article coppa in Diez gives a brief picture 
of what became of the word during the Middle Ages and in the 
modern Latin languages : what had originally meant coop or vat took 
the meaning of cup and bowl, head and tuft, mountain-top and 
vaulted dome. In German not only kiibel and kappel (tub and 
dome) are derived from this word, but also kopf, for in primitive 
fashion bowl and head or skull are similarly named, and the name of 
the vessel passes to ship and boat, cabin and coffin. The Greek (Sov T ig, 
fiovTiov, (ting, (Hvrivri, corresponding to the Latin cupa, cuppa, has a 
similarly varied application and extent throughout North Europe, and 
is still heard in the German biitte, tub, bbttcher, cooper, in the French 
botte, boot, bouteille, bottle, etc. From the same root probably comes 
Old Irish bothan, hut, both, house, Pruss. bullan,and Lith. buttas, house, 
and even the German and Slavic bude, booth. 

Our ohm, formerly ahm, awme, is the borrowed Greek a\ir\, Latin 
hama; our seidel, pint, is the Latin situla; our flasche, bottle, prob- 
ably, in the last instance, the Latin vasculum, though now it generally 
means a glass vessel. Glass also, like wood, is a substance that first 
became an article of universal daily use in the North, and in post- 
Roman times ; from the wooden cask we tap the wine into glass 
bottles, which we close with cork stoppers. The first, the bottles, are 
scarcely older than the fifteenth century (see Beckmann, Beitrage, ii. 
p. 485) ; the art of closing the narrow mouth of a vessel with the 
elastic bark of the cork-oak cannot be very ancient, and only became 
common during the last few centuries, and that very slowly. The 
cork-oak, quercus suber, probably exists no longer in Greece ; it was 
rare there even in the olden time ; it is a tree belonging to South- 
Western Europe and the opposite shores of Africa. It cannot with 
certainty be recognised among the varieties of oak mentioned by 
Theophrastus : the tree that when stripped of its bark thrives all the 
better, he places in Tyrrhenia, i.e., towards the west ; but, at the same 
time, he observes that it sheds its leaves in winter, which is calculated 
to puzzle us again (H.pl., 3, 17, 1). Pausanias (8, 12, 1) mentions 
among the oaks of Arcadia, one whose rind is so light and loose that it 
is used as floats for anchors and nets — evidently the cork-oak ; but his 
description shows that it was a natural wonder with which his readers 
were unacquainted. The Romans had an individual name for the 
cork-oak, suber, which distinguished it clearly from all other forest- 
trees. We already hear of the bark in the story of Camillus. Camillus 
was to be named dictator, but a decree of the Senate, then shut up in 
the Capitol by the Gauls, was necessary. A youth called Pontius 
Cominius undertook to carry the message. As the bridge over 



NOTES. 457 



the Tiber was watched by the enemy, he swam at night across 
the river, supported by pieces of cork (Plut. Cam. 25, 3 : toiq <peXKoTg 
ityiig to auijia Kai avvnriKovty'i^iov T<i> 7repaiov(r9ai Trpbg ttjv ttoXiv t^sj3rj). The 
custom of closing vessels with resined cork was derived, it seems, from 
the Gauls. Colum. 12, 23 : " Coriicata ftix qua utuntur ad condituras 
Allobroges." Cato, 120, prescribes : " Mustum si voles totum annum 
habere, in amphoram mustum indito et corticem oppicato, demittito in 
piscinam; that is, to keep the must fresh the whole year, the mouth 
of the amphora is to be closed with cork and pitch, and the vessel 
then kept at the bottom of the tank. In Horace, the wine-containing 
amphora is secured with a " cork made tight with pitch." Od. 3, 8, 9 : 

"Hie dies anno redeunte festus 
Corticem adstrictum pice demovebit 
Amphorae fumum bibere institutae 
Consule TulloP 

Pliny speaks more plainly as to the use and utility of the rind of the 
cork-tree : 16, 34 : " Usus ejus {suberis) ancoralibus maxume navium 
(buoys, for which light wood is now generally used), piscantiumque 
tragulis (floats for fishing-nets), et cadorum opturamentis (bungs for 
casks), praeterea i?i hiberno feminarum calciatu (soles to put in 
slippers, such as are still used)." Notwithstanding all this, what we 
understand by corking was rare among the Romans, who generally 
used pitch, plaster, wax, etc., and poured oil on the top of that, still a 
frequent practice in Italy, to preserve the liquid from the air ; the 
shape of the earthenware vessels, their larger size and wider opening 
were not well suited for closure by a cork. This state of things 
remained much the same during the Middle Ages. Barrels were 
bunged with wooden plugs ; smaller vessels of earthenware, tin, or 
wood, to be slung round the neck or waist when hunting or travelling, 
and the silver or gold bottles of the higher classes were plugged or 
screwed tight with stoppers of the same material, or with wax, etc. 
The invention of the narrow-necked and cheap glass bottle, and the 
extension of trade first caused the cork (from cortex, but probably 
through the Spanish corcha ; the French liege, the light material, is 
from levis) to come into general use, and it now seems to us indis- 
pensable in the preservation of fine wines. 

Note 32, page 86. 

At another festival, held about the same time, the Thargelia, the 
two (papfiaKoi, who were led to death as an expiatory sacrifice, were 
hung one with white and the other with black figs, and were scourged 



458 



NOTES. 



with fig-rods (A. Mommsen, Heortologie, p. 417). It was an ancient 
Ionic festival, but what was meant by the fig is doubtful 



Note 33, page 87. 
The Ficus Ruminalis, so called after Jupiter Ruminus and the Diva 
Rumina, whose names again were derived from ruma= mamma, sym- 
bolizing fertility and procreation ; see Preller, Rom. MythoL, p. 368, 
and Corssen, Kritische Beitrage, p. 429. The custom of making 
figures of Priapus out of the wood of the fig-tree belongs to the same 
circle of ideas. A variation of an old legend in Strabo (Hesiod, 
Fragm. clxix., Gottling) shows how the. Jig-tree and the swine had the 
same value as images of exuberant creation. Hesiod related that 
Calchas at Colophon asked Mopsus, the grandson of Tiresias, how 
many figs there were on a fig-tree standing before them ; Mopsus 
having stated the number and measure correctly, Calchas died with 
the painful impression of having met with a more excellent seer than 
himself. Pherecydes told the same story, only that instead of the 
quantity of fruit on a fig-tree, the question was about the number of 
pigs to which a sow that lay before them would give birth. From 
this it has been supposed that cvkov and avg, a sow, were derived from 
the same hypothetical root su, to generate ; and that ficus, too, was 
analogous to fieri, <pveiv. But this etymology cannot be trusted, 
because the date of the introduction of the fig among the Greeks and 
Romans is too late to admit of such primitive formations. Benfey 
(1, 442) presumes that the Greek word was borrowed from the East, 
and appeals in proof to avKdfiivog. The Latin form shows that a 
digamma had stood after the c, from which proceeded the long vowel 
v ; ficus arose out of gFikov, like fides from acpidtg, and asfa/iere is the 
same as c<pa\\uv, fungus as <j<p6yyoQ, etc. As the Thebans said rvm 
for ovkci, and the Syracusan quarter 'Evktj seems also to have been 
called TvKfj, from which arose by a misunderstanding the later Tu%?/, 
as though it meant " fortune " ; Ahrens (De Dial. Dorica, p. 64) thinks 
the original form was tFikov. Or did the Greeks pronounce the foreign 
consonant sometimes as s, and sometimes as /,like Sor, Sar, and Tvpog, 
Tyre ? That in the north of the Greek peninsula the first letter of the 
kindred word <wcva (for avKva, avida ?) was also pronounced r, may be 
concluded from the Slavic tykva, pumpkin, which the Slavs doubtless 
got from the region of the Danube. The Gothic name for fig, smakka 
and the Slavic smokva— on the strength of which Kuhn {Zeitschr., 4, 
17) assumes a primitive form sFakva for the Greek also— is probably 
only a corruption, as the long v did not fit into the Gothic system of 
vowels, unless the change had already taken place in the language of 



NOTES. 459 



the northern tribes of the Balkan peninsula, which passed the word 
on to them. To say m for b was a barbarism (Steph. Byz. : 'AfidvTig' 
to A(3avria QtjXvkov, 07rep Kara (3ap(3apLKrjv rpoirriv rov /3 rig p. 'Apavria IX^x®*! 
irapa 'Avriyovtp iv Maicedoviicy irspirjyijaei) . So 'Apvdu>v (a town of the 
Paeonians already in Homer) alternated with A/3u£wv, the 'AXprjvtj 
in Ptolemy is perhaps for Albania, the river Boyypog in Herodotus 
is afterwards called Margus, now Morawa, Bellerophontes in 
Italian becomes Melerpanta, etc. Also p and v become m : 
airaXog was called in Macedonian dpaXSg, the river Tilaventum 
is the modern Tagliamento, etc. So the original digamma in 
gvkov might meet the Goths when they came to the Danube in 
the shape of an m, with the auxiliary vowel a. The Wends, who 
lived next behind the Goths, could have only received the fig, in 
a dried state of course, from the Goths ; therefore the Slavic name 
(Old Slav. s?nokuvi, smoky r , srnokvd) was merely borrowed from the 
Gothic at a time when the assimilation of kv into kk had not yet 
taken place. We must add that the wild fig-tree Ipivsog, from which 
the cultivated fig cannot be derived, is heard of already in Homer, 
and that its name is perhaps etymologically identical with that of the 
fruit, oXwQog. 

Note 34, page 99. 

A. de la Marmora (Itineraire de Vile de Sardaigne, 2, p. 353, Turin, 
i860) says of the Sardinian olive : " On £ exprimerait mal, & mon avis, 
si Von voulait parler de V introduction qu'on y aurait faite de cette 
plante, puisque ce pays est visiblement sa patrie nature lie" This 
remark of the eminent naturalist, though historically incorrect, proves 
how luxuriantly the tree thrives in its newly-conquered European 
sphere of culture. In Corsica too there are splendid groves of olives 
now, and yet the Romans had much trouble in transplanting the tree 
thither. Nay, if we may believe Seneca's rhetoric, there was no cul- 
tivation of it at all in the wild island in his time (Epigr. super exilio, 
2, 3, 4 : 

" Non po?na auctumnus, segetes non educat aestas, 
Canaque Palladio munere bruma caret"). 

Even in Sardinia the government found it advisable to promise a title 
to any one who should cultivate a number of olive-trees, just as the 
Venetians were obliged to encourage the same cultivation in their 
Greek possessions by rewards. The wild olive-tree, says La Marmora 
in another place {Voyage en Sardaigne, 1, 164, ed. 2), covers immense 
spaces in the hilly region of the island, and only awaits inoculation to 
bear splendid fruit. But, we may ask, Is the tree really wild there, or 



4 6o NOTES. 



only go?ie wild ? After two and a half millenniums and the unspeak- 
able miseries of war that filled them, the latter supposition is certainly 
not too bold. 

Note 35, page 109. 
Among the Arabs in Africa the date-palm is spared during devas- 
tating inroads into the enemy's country. G. Rohlfs {Afrikanische 
Reisen, p. 70, Bremen, 1869, ed. 2): "The fields were wasted, the 
water-channels destroyed, the ksors (villages) everywhere strongly 
barricaded from without, the fruit-trees felled ; only the olive, which 
is always respected, lifted its crown sorrowfully above the deserted 
fields, where for two months men had daily murdered each other for 
nothing" (p. 186) ; " Mussulmen think it one of the greatest crimes to 
cut down a palm-tree. When the Hadji Abd-el-Kader related his 
heroic deeds, he asked me, Was I right to fell the palm-trees of my 
enemies ? I answered, No ; for here in the desert the palm is the 
only sustenance of man. This answer pleased him ; he said that until 
then every one, even the Tholbas, had told him he was right, while an 
inner voice upbraided him with having done a great wrong." 



Note 36, page iio. 

The Greek ovog, Lat. asinus, we agree with Benfey in deriving from 
a Semitic word corresponding to the Hebrew athdn, she-ass ; where, 
in the Greek word, the sibilant arisen out of the dental th is supposed 
to have dropped out before the n. From the Latin are further derived 
the Gothic asi/us, Lithuanian asilas, and Slavic osilii. Herodotus 
expressly says that there were neither asses nor mules in Scythia, the 
country being too cold for those animals (4, 129 : did rd ipvxta), and he 
adds that the Scythian cavalry were repeatedly forced to retreat by 
the voices of the asses in Darius's army. Aristotle confirms this, 
with the addition, that it was also too cold for the ass among the 
Celts beyond Iberia — De animal, generate 2, 8 : diowsp Iv roig x^P-^P^^Q 
ov 6e\u yiveaOai tottoiq Sid to Svapiyov elvai ttjv <pv<riv, oiov in pi ~S.Kv9ag kcii 
ttjv opopov xwpav, ovSe 7repi KeXrovg rovg inrep rrjg 'Iflrjpiag' ipvxpd yap icai 
uvti] 1) x^pct. So in Hist, anim., 8, 25 : Svapiyorarov d' Ioti tu>v toiovtcjv 
Zyiov' Sib Kal Trspl Uovtov icai H\v Hkv9iki]v ov ylvovrai ovoi. Not otherwise 
Strabo, 7, 4, 18 : ovovq ti yap ov Tptyovvi {Svapiyov yap to K^ ov ) > ^ n( i 
Pliny, 8, 167 : " Ipsum animal iasinus) frigoris maxume impatiens, 
ideo non generatur in PontoP As the ass is not so much a gregarious 
as a domestic animal, and his business chiefly consists in carrying 
burdens hither and thither within the limits of human settlements 
(hence Italian somaro, ass, literally sumpter-beast ; Mod. Greek yopdpi 



NOTES. 461 



from yofiog, burden, load), he cannot have taken any part in the earliest 
migrations of Indo-European pastoral tribes. The word will have 
reached the Lithuanians through neighbouring German tribes, perhaps 
at an early time, for instance, that of the Gothic king Ermanarich, for, 
like the pedlars from the South, mountebanks with asses bestridden 
by apes wandered through the barbarous countries ; the first Christian 
missionaries may also have spread the knowledge of the animal, for 
the ass was frequently mentioned in the Bible stories, and may have 
been represented in rude pictures illustrating the sacred history. The 
Slavic name is also of Gothic origin. But the Gothic asilus itself is 
directly derived from the Latin, not from ase/ius, which form is want- 
ing in the Romance tongues, showing it was not popular, and is also 
accented contradictorily ; but from asinus with the very common 
change of n into the / more facile to the German tongue. So out of 
the Latin catinns was made the Gothic katils, Slav, kotilu, kettle \ 
from lagena the O. H. Germ, lagella, Mid. H. Germ. Icigel, little pot j 
from organutn the German orgel, organ ; from cuminum the O. H. 
Germ, chumil, cummin. Some Teutonic languages have a by-form in 
which the Latin n is retained. Of the Celtic assal, Stockes (Irish 
Glosses, 296) also thinks that according to the laws of sound it can be 
no native word, but must be derived from the Latin ; in a later passage 
(p. 159) he adds that even ovoq and asinus seem to be of Oriental and 
not of Indo-European origin. In the so-called Terramara-beds of 
Parma, which belong to the bronze age, none but doubtful bones of 
asses were met with, and those only in the upper strata (Mittheilungen 
der Antiquarischen Gesellsch. in Zurich, vol. xiv. p. 136). Therefore 
the ass appeared later than bronze in that part of Italy. 

Note 37, page 112. 

The Homeric fif.uov(ov dyponpawv can only mean — reared on the 
pasture, in free herds, not yet tamed. Such young animals came from 
the Eneti, and were then broken in by the owner, just like horses. 
Modern exponents of Homer consider the mule, that mongrel between 
horse and ass, to be a natural wild race of animals ; or they remind 
us of the equus hemionus of the zoologists, the jiggetai in the deserts, 
of Asia, which must have been imported, I suppose, to adorn the zoo- 
logical gardens of the Trojans ! But the onagri which Liudpraud, on 
his embassy of the year 968, saw on a marsh at Constantinople, may 
have been real jiggetais. Unfortunately, Liudpraud had not enough 
interest in the matter to inquire of the keepers whence these wild 
asses came, or to describe them more closely. 

The Latin mulus is probably derived from the Greek fivx^og, breeding- 



462 NOTES. 



ass, where the omission of the \ ls reflected in the length of the vowel. 
Mt>xXo? was, according to Hesychius, a Phocaean word, and the Pho- 
caeans were the mariners and colonizers of the West. The Albanian 
(also Wallachian) mushke^ and the Slavic mtsku, misgu, mishte, which 
cannot be derived from mesiti^ meshati, to mix, must come from \ivxkbg ; 
it is wanting in Polish and Lithuanian, and will be a Thracian form 
of word. The modern Russians have derived both their expressions 
for mule, ishak and loshak, as well as their name for horse, from the 
Tartars. If the language of the great Thraco-Illyrian race — which 
must very early have introduced a great many ideas of culture into 
the North — had been preserved to us, we should have a far clearer 
insight into the primitive history of Europe. Much that now deceives 
us with the semblance of original affinity would prove, we believe, to 
be the migration of culture. The two names for ass, horse, or mule, 
mannus and burzcus, whose varied forms Diefenbach {Origines Euro- 
fiaeae, p. 378) has collected, seem to be of Celtic or Iberian origin. 
What if they be simply popular corruptions of yfiiovog and optvg (with 
digamma represented by b), and had penetrated into the Ligurian and 
Iberian west, by way of Massilia and the Spanish-Greek towns, 
together with the animal itself? The Latin hinnus for the offspring 
of a stallion and she-ass (Varro, De r. r. t 2, 81 : "Ex equa enim et asino 
fit mulus, contra ex equo et asina hinnus ") is likewise of Greek origin 
— 'Iwog, iwog, yivvog. If the y here answers to an old digamma, the 
migration of the word to Italy must be ascribed to a comparatively 
late period, which is likely enough from the nature of the case, as this 
kind of coupling was less common. 



Note 38, page 113 
The Greek a% alyog, goat, is found again in Sanskrit and Lithua- 
nian, and therefore goes back to the time before the separation of the 
nations. It does not necessarily follow that the primitive race already 
possessed the goat as a domestic animal ; it might call any leaping 
animal of the chase by a name that afterwards passed to the tame 
goat when that became known — a possibility which should be more 
frequently considered in similar cases by those who so boldly infer the 
state of culture of the primitive stock from the existence of certain 
words common to all races. Movers, following very different traces 
and combinations, tries to prove the origin of the goat in the moun- 
tainous part of North Africa (ii., 2, p. 366). The ancients now and 
then mention wild goats in Greece and Italy. But goats easily run 
wild, and then multiply rapidly. In the seventeenth century all the 
inhabitants of the Isle of Cerigo were either murdered or carried off 



NOTES. 463 



by the Turks, and their dwellings burnt down. Only a few goats 
escaped. Fifteen years later these had increased to many thousands, 
but had become as wild as chamois (Beckmann, Literatur der alteren 
Reise-beschreibungen, 1, 547). La Marmora had heard a great deal 
about the wild goats on the little island of Tavolara, near Sardinia, an 
island which is nothing but an immense block of limestone. When, 
not without trouble and danger, he had killed a few of these animals, 
examination proved that the so-called wild goats were nothing but 
tame animals run wild {Voyage en Sardaigne, i. p. 174, ed. 2.). But 
it is certain that on the rocky labyrinths of the Greek islands, and of 
Sicily, Sardinia, and Calabria, as well as in Palestine and on the 
Atlas, the goat feels more at home, yields more milk, and is better 
grown than in the foggy, grassy, and woody lowlands, on which in 
the primitive time the Germanic and Lithuano-Slavic races pastured 
their oxen. 

Note 39, page 113. 

The South-east of Europe, the slopes of the Carpathians and the 
neighbouring plains were from the very beginning one immense forest 
of lime-trees, which furnished even in historic times an immeasurable 
quantity of honey, and in which the Slavs, who moved into them, 
dwelt and feasted. As the culture of the soil advanced, every bee- 
master had his fixed portion of the wood, and the honey-trees were 
marked. Only at a late period did bee-hives, alvei^ alvearia (Middle 
Latin apile^ Lithu. avilys, Slav, ulei, in Hesychius a.Trk\\ai=ar]Kol) be- 
come common near the houses and in the gardens, while the forest 
retreated. In Lithuania and Russia the collecting of honey in the 
woods continued to be the rule down to a late period. Strahlenberg 
{Das nord- und ostliche Theil von Europa undAsia, p. 333, 4 , Stock- 
holm, 1730) : " In Lithuania and in many parts of Russia bees are not 
so often kept near the house in baskets, or in hewn blocks of wood or 
hives, as out in the woods on the highest and straightest fir-trees, near 
the tops of them," etc.; after which the author relates that the Dorpat 
peasants (in Livonia) had in old times made a contract with the 
citizens of Pleskau " that they might keep their stock of bees in the 
woods of Pleskau;" "but when these woods were ruined and cut down, 
the practice ceased." This keeping of forest-bees was the business of 
the bee-master (Russian bortnik, Polish bartnik) ; in the course 
of centuries it had retired from Gaul, where it must once have 
flourished, to Germany, where the bees belonged to the Mark, and 
the law-books give decisions on the bee-pasture ; and then farther to 
North-eastern Europe, where it was preserved the longest. 



4 6 4 NOTES. 



Note 40, page 117. 

Bacmeister. Alemann. Wander. 1, 61 : " Mauer and Zimmer in 
names of places show the same antithesis of Roman and German. 
The German raised no muri of stone, he timbered. The word mauer 
(0. H. G. miira, M. H. G. mure) he learnt, with the mason's art, from 
the Romans ; and in many names, though not in all, it takes us back 
to real Roman works. The Gothic Bible renders 'foundation' and 
' town-wall ' by grundu-vaddjus and baurgs-vaddjus . This vaddjus 
(fern.) is our Wand, connected with Goth, vidan {vadjan) to bind, and 
must have meant a wattled fence (Tac. Germ. 16). To build is in 
Gothic timrjan." 

In the text we could only touch in passing upon the Art of 
Building, though the most fruitful points of view would be opened 
out by a closer examination. Whence, for example, is derived the 
Gothic razn, domus ? Another unsolved riddle is hus, house (Fick, 
247, says the Old Norse Ms, domus, is identical with Old Norse haus, 
cranium ; Grimm, that it corresponds to Lat. curia; the Dictionary, 
that it is from the root ku, sku, to cover : the Slavic khizha, hut, must 
be borrowed) ; we believe it to be a word borrowed from an Iranian 
language (compare Lerch, Forschungen, pp. 88 and 103), as the much- 
debated god, Gothic guth, must also be derived from the same source. 
The Iranian races on European soil must have had a greater influence 
on culture and religion, and have left more traces in the languages, 
than has hitherto been noticed. As, according to Tacitus, the Slavs 
had adopted many Sarmatian customs, and, for example, exchanged 
their old name for God for that of the Iranian one, it is improbable 
that the Germans could remain uninfluenced. Not all Scythians 
were Nomads ; some among their divisions, the IkvQcii apoTrjpig and 
yeiopyoi, cultivated the ground and traded in corn. The early colonies 
on the Pontus must have had as educating an influence upon them 
as Massilia had on the Celts ; and it is clear enough from what 
Herodotus says that the countrymen of Anacharsis had at least a 
developed system of deities. Later on the Quadi and Jazyges, the 
Goths and Alani,were comrades in war, and are often named together 
(Amm. Marc, 17, 12 : " Permistos Sarmatas et Quados, vicinitate et 
similitudine morum armaturaeque Concordes "). And Vannius, king of 
the Suevi, who ruled under the Roman Senate for thirty years, kept a 
Sarmatian and Jazygian cavalry. 

Note 41, page 121. 

Niebuhr, Beschreibung von Arabie?i, p. 57, 4 , Copenhagen, 1772 : 
"They have a thick white drink, busa, which is prepared from flour. 



NOTES. 465 



... In Armenia it is a drink universally known. There it is kept in 
large pots in the earth, and is commonly drunk out of these pots by 
means of a reed" Then in a note : " Busa seems to resemble the 
drink called by the Russians kisly-shchi, or that which they call kvass." 
But the latter are not intoxicating, as the drink described by Xenophon 
was. 

Note 42, page 128. 

The Sovsovat of Herodotus is still found in the interior of Asia Minor. 
A trunk of a tree hollowed out like a tube is closed at each end with a 
board, and has a hole at the top. This vessel hangs by two strings, 
and is swung backwards and forwards by a young girl till the butter 
comes. See the picture in Van Lennep's " Travels in Little Known 
Parts of Asia Minor," 1, p. 131, London, 1870. 

Note 43, page 133. 

If Parthey's assertion (in his edition of Plut. De Iside et Os., p. 158) 
is correct, that on the oldest mummies of all, the wrappages are of 
sheep's wool, and that linen bands only come in with the twelfth 
dynasty, after which they become universal, it proves that even in 
Egypt flax was a comparatively young product of culture. This we 
should be obliged to assume even without direct historical evidence, 
for Egypt, when first taken possession of, was certainly a pastoral 
land, a land of vopoi, for which it was destined by nature ; the only 
thing to be remarked is, that according to that the practice of 
embalming, the development of a higher political order, etc., preceded 
a knowledge of the flax plant. We are told that pieces of linen were 
found in an Old Chaldaean grave, therefore of a time that is supposed 
to have preceded the kingdom of Babylon {Journal of the R. Asiatic 
Society, vol. xv. p. 271 : " Pieces of linen are observed about the 
bones, and the whole skeleton seems to have been bound with a 
species of thong"). But was it really linen, and not a web made of 
some bast-like plant ? 

Note 44, page 133. 

The number of threads, 360, evidently answered to the number of 
days in the oldest year (Peter von Bohlen, Das alte Indien, 2, p. 270). 
The Egyptian was buried so deep in symbolism, that to him nothing 
was unconnected with religion ; the realest thing that can be, the 
practical technics of handiwork, he sanctified by mysticism, and 
linked it with heaven. What the political and scientific romanticists 

30 



466 NOTES. 



of the nineteenth century have sought for and demanded, "a Chris- 
tian State, Christian national economy, Christian astronomy," etc., 
actually existed in ancient Egypt. Goethe {Farbenlehre, Zur Geschichte 
der Urzeit) : " Stationary nations handle their technics with religion." 
But it is interesting that in Pliny's report, five hundred years after 
Herodotus, the number 365 already appears instead of 360, a silent 
correction of the legend, which at the same time confirms the above 
explanation. The two Egyptian measures, called hinn and kiti, 
were also each divided into 360 parts (Lepsius in the Zeitschrift fur 
AUgvptische Sprache, p. 109, 1865), a mystico-religious arrangement, 
as the subdivisions were too small for practical use. The art of 
weaving, where two opposite movements by intercrossing beget a 
third thing, afforded to the mythic phantasy of the oldest times a 
picture of two natural powers, one conceptive, the other generative, 
and their fruitful combmation. 

Note 45, page 134. 
If the Colchian linen had come by way of the Lydian capital 
Sardis, the adjective must rather have been ^apdirjvov, SapditjviKov. 
As Herodotus says that the Colchians and Egyptians wove in the 
same manner, /card raurd, was there in Colchis also a fabric whose 
threads consisted of 360 finer fibres, and which was called Sardonic 
after the Lydian and universally Iranic word cdpSig, a year? Like 
Herodotus, a modern naturalist also brings Egyptian and Colchian 
flax into connexion with each other. Unger {Botanische Streifziige 
auf dent Gebiet der Kulturgeschichte, Wiener Sitzungsberichte, vol. 
xxxviii. p. 130) says : "The flax-plant is not indigenous in Egypt, but 
was introduced there, and indeed, to judge by the nature of the plant, 
from far more northern lands, probably from Colchis." Surely not 
straight from Colchis, but by way of Babylon. 

Note 46, page 143. 
A passage in the Odyssey (10, 156) gives us a distinct picture of how 
the primitive European world procured ropes during the forest-epoch. 
Ulysses has killed an unusually large stag on Circe's island, and the 
question is, how to carry the booty to his companions on the shore. 
He gathers branches and twigs, pSnccug re. Xvyovg re, spins them into 
a rope a fathom long, well twisted at both ends, Tzd<j\xa kdarpsfeg 
an<poTepu)9Ev, with which he ties the animal's feet together, hangs the 
latter round his neck, and so carries it down to the black ship. 
Compare with this the following description of Nesselmann, in 
his Dictionary of the Lithuanian language, p. 180: " Kardelus or 



NO'JES. 467 



kardelis, a strong rope for binding wooden rafts and wittinnen (a 
kind of river-boats), ge7ierally twisted of bast or twigs ; the cable in 
larger ships ; the third-pole of a waggon, a young birch-tree provided 
with a twisted loop, or also a rope, to which the third horse is 
fastened." What is still the custom in undeveloped Lithuania was 
practised by the Germans in ancient times. Grimm, RA., 683 : 
" Simple antiquity instead of hempen ropes, twisted branches of fresh, 
tough wood," O. H. Germ., wit, Mid. H. Germ., wide, lancwit, widen, 
to bind, our wiede, langwiede, also in the other Teutonic tongues 
[Samson's " seven green withs "] as well as in the Celtic and Slavic 
(the various forms in Diefenbach, G. W. 1, 146). The with served to 
bind together roofs or rafts, waggons and yokes, for the leashing of 
animals, for scourging and for hanging criminals, etc. In every 
respect the Latin vitis corresponds with this description. That word 
does not mean a plant climbing up a tree or trunk, but, like vitex, 
vimen, and the Greek Irea, a flexible plant that served men for 
winding and plaiting. Virgil says lentae vites, like lenta salix. As 
the slave and malefactor are beaten with the plaited with, and the 
Mid. H. Germ, verb widen actually means to flog ; so among the 
Romans the vitis in the hand of the centurion was the tool for 
punishing disobedient soldiers, for example, Livy, Epit., 57 : " Quern 
militem extra ordinem deprehendit, si Romanus esset, vitibits, si 
extraneus, fustibits ceciditP A climbing plant resembling the vine, 
namely, the Bryony, Latin vitis alba, the name of which probably 
passed over to the vine, is expressly named together with the willow 
by Ovid {Met., 13, 800 : 

" Lentior et salicis virgis et vitibus albis "), 

and served like the broom and rush for plaiting baskets (Serv. ad 
Virg. G. 1, 165 : " Quoniam de genistis vel junco vel alba vite solent 
fieri"). Compare the Old Norse sneis, branch, and Mid. H. Germ. 
sneise, string. Probably in the same way the O. H. Germ, repa, vine, 
is related to the Gothic skauda-raip, shoe-string, and O. H. Germ. 
reif, rope ; signifying therefore a plant used for plaiting and ropes, a 
shrub with flexible twigs, in which the partridge nestles (reb'huhn, 
vine-hen) ; and afterwards, when the grape-vine became known, was 
applied to that. In French the with was and is called hard, hart, 
the osier that serves for binding harcelle, which, as compared with 
the Lith. kardelus, show the German consonant-change, and are 
therefore derived from German. 

It was a stride forwards when the bast of trees, and a still longer 
stride when the fibres of the nettle were worked into ropes, bridles, 
girdles, stuffs, clothes, shields, etc. The Massagetas clothe themselves 



4 68 NOTES. 



in bast, says Strabo (il, 8, 7 : afiirexovTCii Se (oi Maaaaykrai) rovg t&* 
Skvdpojv <p\oiovg) ; so do the Germani (Mela, 3, 3, 2 : " Viri sagis 
velantur aut libris arborum, quamvis saeva hieme"), and carry shields 
made of the raw bark of trees (Val. Flacc. 6, 97, of the Bastarnae : 

" Qztos, duce Teutogono, crudi mora corticis armat "). 

For such bast fabrics the linden-tree was commonly used, and is 
named from this property in all languages. The Greek <pCXvpa is 
both linden and bast, and is certainly related to <pXoi6g, bark, and 
<t>eXX6g, cork. Theophrastus, h. pi., 5, 7, 5 : !*« St kciI (?) ^iXvpa) rbv 
fXoibv xpfowov irpog re rd cxoivia ical irpbg rag Kicrrag. So Theophrastus 
still knows of the bast of lindens being used for ropes and chests. In 
the great linden-region of Europe, in White and Little Russia, and 
the districts bordering the Carpathians, linden-bark is to this day in 
common use, and serves, according to the age of the tree, for waggon- 
baskets and river-boats, for mats, ropes, shoes, sacks, sieves, etc, 
The number of trees yearly felled in those districts and in the well- 
wooded north-eastern part of Russia for the sake of their rind is 
reckoned at about a million ; the bast is softened in water and the 
material is ready. O. H. Germ, linta, A. Saxon and Old Norse lznd> 
the linden-tree, Old Norse, lindi, the girdle. Lind in German dialects 
means bast, Lind-schleisser was an old word for rope-maker (see 
Grimm, RA., p. 261 and 520). The Latin linteum cannot be 
separated from the German lind; Wackernagel would derive the 
Romance barca, a bark, from the Low-German borke, Old Norse 
borkr, though the Greek fiapig, flat boat, which perhaps comes from 
Egypt, the Messapian (3apig and Latin baris seem to have the better 
claim. The Homeric XitL, XTto. (for Xtvrl Xivra), which is only found 
in the dative and accusative, we agree with Pott in bringing into 
this connexion ; it signified a coarse cloth, probably at first a mat of 
lime-bast : the chariot, when put aside, is covered with it ; it is spread 
over seats under the beautiful purple cover ; the corpse of Patroclus is 
wrapt in it, and over that is thrown the white shroud. It is uncertain 
whether we are to consider it a real bast-mat, or a coarse linen-cloth. 
Latin tilia % linden, tzliae, bast ; French teiller, to beat hemp ; Italian 
tiglio, the rind of hemp. To the Slavic lipa, and Lith. lepa, lime-tree, 
answers the Greek Xknuv, to peel, XsirTog, tender (constantly used of 
flaxen stuffs, \g7rrd u^a(r/iara=linen fabrics), Lith. luptz, to peel, O. H. 
Germ, louft, loft, tree-rind. In the same way the Latin llcium doubt- 
less belongs to the same series as Lith. lunkas, Russ., Polish, and 
Czech, lyko, bast. As the Latin liber proves, bast was also the most 
ancient writing-material. (Ulp. Dig., 32, 52 : " Librorum appellatione 
continezitur omnia volzimina, sive in charta, sive i?z membra7za sinty. 



A'OTJSS. 469 



sive in quavis alia materia : sed et si in philyra aut in tilia, ut 
nonnulli conficiunt, aut in quo alio corio, idem erit dicendum "). At the 
dawn of historical times, this much-used material is everywhere dis- 
appearing, but many names used for it passed over to the new plants 
that took its place. 

Still more like flax were the fabrics made out of the fibres of the 
common wild nettle. They are still quite common among the half- 
nomads on the borders of Asia and Europe, a district that, in the 
gradual retreat of the ancient epochs of culture towards the East, 
often reveals a surprising picture of primitive Europe. The women of 
the Bashkirs, the Koibals, Sagai-Tartars, etc., work the urtica dioeca 
not only into nets and yarn, but into a sort of linen (see Storch's 
Tableau Historique et Statistique de F Empire de Russie, ii., 249, 
1801). Pallas, in his " Journey through Different Provinces of the Rus- 
sian Empire" (I. p. 448, St. Petersburg, 1801), says of the Bashkirs : 
" They mostly manufacture for themselves a coarse linen stuff for 
clothing, . . . spinning the yarn out of the common great-nettle. These 
nettles grow in heaps on the rich soil around their dwellings, and, like 
hemp, are pulled up in autumn, dried, then soaked a little, and the 
bast usually taken off with the hand by crushing the stalks, and 
pounded in wooden mortars, till nothing but the tow remains." A 
fraud frequent in Turkestan is to weave nettle-fibres in with the silks 
and then pass off the stuffs for pure damask. Nestor relates in a 
remarkable passage that Oleg, sailing from Constantinople, provided 
the ships of the Russians with sails of fiovoloka, and those of the Slavs 
with sails made of nettle, kropiva (see Schlozer, Nestor, iii. p. 295). 
The first word is explained by Krug in his Zur Miinzkunde Russ- 
lands, p. 109, St. Petersb., 1805, as a corruption of Babylonian stuff, 
that is, silk ; perhaps the " nettle " sails were linen ones, which had 
retained the old name, only a finer kind, for the Slavs complained that 
they had not got their usual coarse sails which could better resist a 
storm. That the Germans also made nets of nettle-yarn is proved by 
the etymological affinity of the two words, Gothic nati, A. Saxon net, 
net, A. Saxon netele, nettle, etc. ; and the nettle itself, Pruss. noatis, 
Lith. nolere, Lettish ndtra, Old Irish nenaid (reduplicated, Cormac, 
p. 126), seems to have taken its name from nahen, to sew. Albertus 
Magnus still knows of the urtica being used for weaving {De Vegeta- 
bilibus, edit. Jessen, 6, 462 : " Duas autem habet pelles {urtica), interi- 
orem et exterior em j et illae sunt, ex quibus est operatio, sicut ex lino et 
canaboj" and directly after : "Sedpannus urticae firurilum excitat,quod 
nonfacit lini vel canabi"). The China-grass, which we now get from 
India, Java, and China, is nothing but the stinging nettle, or one of its 
varieties, and furnishes stuffs that are in every way superior to cotton. 



NOTES. 

When flax reached the European nations, it was natural that the 

f :._-• :\~ nine: :*:r ns: irA re:: A iii At - :::::::: 5 ~ _: ". i : t im- 
plied to the new plant. Thus the Latin Unieum acquired the meaning 
rAntr. ... it :r. I-errr. :.- "; .:" :t:i :~e i A t — tin.! r ::" ':;. = :. in i .': :.:V 
Ai: ::" Ae :ree :in: EiiA.fA i: - 1 . LLeAi: rime :':: nt::Lt := Ae A — .- 
lie dynat, danad, in Old Cornish UnJkaden, Armoric liaad, lenad, Un- 
aden (Zeuss, ed. 2, 1076)1 The primitive form seems to be the Dacian 
* i crr=arii^ s nettle, preserved in Dioseorides (Diefenbach, O. £. S. 
329). and the Greek Aivor with the same change of d into /as in drnad 
and linad. If this conjecture be well rounded, then the Greeks, when 
Aty rtt t- f.i:--: irA Liner. 1 An: Asi in Ae r:e-H nit : : rit. mis: 

_;: ...7.- Aeir nimes :":r Ae neAe irA re::Le A:: := :: 
: - i: ::: .:: ::; ;.:t:.:: :: :::t ::::e :. :: : Ait 

:~t. re 11m e A rime, ir. i in = :~e i is ::.::=. Lrr.r '■'.::: Ae ::n:r;.ry 
; : : r ; 5 5 Ass rrAiAe i:::A:rr :: Ae A~; ::" Ae it ti:;m en: :: 
speech) and that is how the word sounds in Aristophanes {Pac. 1178), 
mi Ae Ami: r :e: Ar:Arir.es .-A..:: 7 _•: -:;.r 15: :if5:re 
has been wrongly changed by Meineke. In this latter form we find 
the word in Italy, lixum; thence it passed to the transalpine nations, 

AA : . t::-T:t }t".n ;r.r::.:e Ais snii : : nines ::r me 
Air.: i:sem ":::"- e.AerAy ierAei fr:~ AiArr ir A ■ ti .:.:. md 
touching on words with the meaning of hair : O. H. Germ. Jlaks 
lA -.:'-:... rtr.::.ve ■•.:-.::..•.- Air As: his ir. :';t l:::.;.'::.i.:.-::i 
Slav. ir/<u* the meaning of tf hair : ■ in the Lith. plausz^s that of "fine 
bast ;*faks, hair, a by-form oijljJis, is identical with the Greek sio*, 
swwe (which last is explained by the Scholiast : : i Ther., 549 : 
xwwf & to pXc*ir t^c SorartK, ue n bast), new, I comb, Latin feet*. 
Ham, harasc, Old Norse iter, flax, we hold to be identical with the 
Ai -".: Am;:.:. Ai:A: .;. -e::Le. i:i A'.:n:i:. A /. iitmr. 
Am.mr. me A ::m £="-ti 17. Am ::t £ .5 5 A.-its ere :: m i : mAAs 

: rim ?:::■ ::' Liner smA mi:s r".i::ei ::" A: :■:. e::. As emmen: 

:ir_riAs:s hi e remmrisei Ae reii Ames : :' Am m :':.r 1:: tmimei 

rtmi .-5 t mrm :: 1: A: Ae A:: 1LA1A: Aimm 1 ::m 7;A:i A^£ 

ds la Pierre Polie, p. 51, Paris et Toulouse, sjl, 410) cautiously say : 

" --' ■'■ ■■ ':.■■.::.::-■'-■. ': :-: ::::: :u. .: •■;.-;-;.-.-;. :. ;. .: .; v ;.;::: .; 

icarte flamemiemse (the great nettle?) «/ >k leur fourmir de quoi 

/aire da veUmtenisT At any rate, the flax was not that we now use, 

but a particular variety. O. Heer says {JfittfieiZuagen der Antiquari- 

-'- - ; A'-yA.v : ; .;-;-; . A:.-:.'. ::. 5:: --Z.'.t A>e-i ~ eAizrs l.r.rr. is 

: :: ^t ::-.-.:- -;. : Tre f-iii-iti.ti --:...;.; .: -^-;. .;;:."::. -; 

~ ■_■ '-■-'■'■ : -= "i: t :: ::.e M±A:t— izein ::_r.:rit= :"r:~ Srtrir 

•-" L - : - •- -m :: A.r ? /rtr.tt.v ~i :e z.iiti :"~e ~ ::'r.er-i".2r.: A ::.: 

: - : -"^ ii-:t-i t. \js Li-en Tit Irt:i- ;i::i-i ;:; tf :iii: At 



NOTES. 471 



inhabitants of the lake-dwellings procured their flax-seeds from 
Southern Europe " — the catch-fly being found as a weed among the 
remains of the flax. According to that, the Swiss cultivation of flax 
was derived from the Italian. The more developed we conceive the 
agriculture and fruit-culture of these lake-dwellers to have been, the 
lower we must place them in point of time. Let us bear in mind that 
the objects hauled up from the bottom of the lakes, however interest- 
ing the sight of them may be, cannot prove anything chronologically ; 
and that all the guesses made as to the age of this culture have been 
founded, not on an examination of its remains, but on other, and often 
very airy, considerations and assumptions. If we were fortunate 
enough to find a Massaliote coin in the middle of one of these bundles 
of flax, or if some good fairy would confide to us a few words of the 
language of these pile-dwellers — such as their names for flax, wheat, 
plough, etc. — what a flash of light would suddenly dart into that dim 
world ! We should not wonder if it then turned out that these mys- 
terious primitive men, with their stone weapons and tools, were no 
other than the ancestors of the Helvetians, whom we have known so 
well since Caesar's time, and that the higher culture of which we find 
traces among them was derived from the shores of the Mediter- 
ranean. 

Note 47, page 150. 
Movers (Phonizier, 2, 3, 157) altogether groundlessly asserts that, 
" hemp for ships' ropes and sails, of the most excellent quality, was 
procured from Phoenicia." This could at most be true of the Roman 
time, when the hemp of the Carian town Alabanda was also greatly 
valued. The expression arrdpTa for ships' ropes, which occurs in a 
single passage in the Iliad 2, 135 : 

Kai 8f/ dovpa akar\Trt veu>v ical airdpra XeXwrai — 

leaves us in the dark as to what they were made of. If, however, we 
compare the kindred word a-n-vpig, Latin sporta, basket, it becomes 
credible that uirapTov too was spun out of a kind of rush or broom. 
But the GTcapTct irvKva loTpa\ip,kva on the linen corslets of the Chalybes 
in Xenophon {Anab. 4, 7, 15) may have been of hempen stuff, as the 
Chalybes dwelt near those districts and nations where hemp first 
appears. 

Note 48, page 151. 

Besides the common European expression, the Slavs have also a 

peculiar word for hemp : Russian penka, Polish pienka, Czech, petiek, 

penka. They may have borrowed these, like so many other things, 

from the Scythians or Sarmatians, for we have in Persic and Afghan 



472 NOTES. 



beng and bang, and even Zendic banha, drunkenness, Bauga, the name 
of the da£va of drunkenness (see Justi, Handbuch, p. 209). A second 
Slavic word for hemp^skom(Russ. and Czech.) answers to O. H. Germ. 
fahs, Greek irkonoQ ; and its Polish form, filoskon, to O. H. Gzrvn. jlahs 
—a remarkable parallelism in the two groups of languages. Bishop 
Otto of Bamberg found among the heathen Slavs in Pomerania much 
canapum (see Herbordi vita Ottonis, in Pertz, Scr. 20, p. 745). 

Note 49, page 156. 
Just as the Locrians treated the Sicilians, the Attic General Hagnon 
is said to have treated the barbarians on the Strymon : he swore to 
them an oath that he would do nothing for three days ; but by night 
he threw up his fortifications, and so founded Amphipolis {Polycen. 
6, 53). When the Persians vainly besieged Barce, in Africa, they 
swore to raise the siege on payment of a tribute by the Barcaeans. 
This promise was to remain valid as long as the earth upon which 
they stood remained firm. But the ground was artificially undermined, 
the earth sank, and the town was attacked and taken (Herod. 4, 201). 
Dido also acquired the site for the foundation of Carthage by a literal 
interpretation of words. The monk of Corvey, Widukind, relates how 
the race of Saxons landed first at Hadeln. One of their young men 
buys a heap of earth from the Thuringians for much gold, and is 
laughed at for being taken in. But he scatters the purchased dust 
all over the country, and thus the land becomes the property of the 
Saxons, whose pretensions are confirmed by a bloody battle and the 
defeat of the Thuringians. The Wartburg came into the possession 
of the Landgrave of Thuringia in a similar manner. Twelve knights, 
standing in the castle-court, swore by their swords that they stood on 
ground belonging to the Landgrave ; but they had brought earth from 
Thuringia into the courtyard with them. Natural nations with unde- 
veloped moral feeling admire cunning as much as valour. An oath 
is feared, but only as a magic spell, and right is still inseparable from 
symbol. Even yet uneducated people make an oath lose its effect by 
using a sort of counter-charm : thus, while they lift the right hand 
up to swear, they hold the left hand behind their back, with three 
fingers pointing down, etc. 

Note 50, page 173. 

Laurus, derived from luo, lavo. Of the same origin are Lavinia, 

Lavinium, Laurentium, the town of atonement, said to have been 

planted round with laurel, etc. (see Schwegler, Rbmische Geschichte, i. 

p. 319). This derivation would be still more certain if, like Benfey, 



NOTES. 473 



we durst connect the Greek 8d<f>vii with Se<pu>, ctypku>, Sl\p<», in the original 
sense of to moisten, to soak. But against this is the Thessalian davxva 
in the compound word dpxi-5avxva-<popeiaag, in Boeckh, C. I., No. 1766, 
as well as the Savxvog for laurel now restored in two passages of 
Nicander (Ther. 94, and Alexiph. 199). Hence some would derive 
the word from a root meaning to burn (Legerlotz in Kuhn's Zeitschr., 
7, 293), so that the laurel would still be a tree used for purifying, only 
not by rinsing but by aromatic fumigation (Paul., Efiit., ed. O. Miiller 
p. 117:" Itaque eandem laurum omnibus suffitionibus adhiberi solitum 
erat"). In that case would the / in laurus stand for d, as in several 
other Latin words? According to Hesychius, the Pergaeans in Asia 
Minor said Xd<pvi] for da<pi>rj, and he gives another word which, because 
of its derivation with r, nearly approaches the Latin : Svapsiw ff iv roig 
Tsfnretri dd<pvr]. If the Greek word is derived from an Asiatic language, 
then, of course, any attempt to explain it etymologically from the 
Greek is vain. Miprog (fivpaivrj, pvppivt], p-vpivrj) is also an Oriental 
word, for it cannot be separated from fivpov, pvppa, o\ivpva. In the 
oldest times, the shrubs whose leaves or exuding gum served for per- 
fumes were not strictly distinguished. To the passages quoted in the 
text we may add Serv. ad. Virg. JEn., 3, 23, where Myrene, a. beautiful 
girl, and priestess of Venus, wishing to marry a youth, is changed by 
the goddess into a myrtus. That the idea of sorrow, as Movers, 1, 
243, has it, is contained in the name of Myrrha, the daughter of 
Cinyras, is from what has been noticed above impossible. 



Note 51, page 175. 

Schneider remarks on the passage quoted from Theophrastus : "Is 
(Plinius) igitur aut plura in suo libro scrip ta legit ', aut aliunde inseruit 
Mithridatis nomen." Pliny could not well find the name of Mithridates 
in his copy of Theophrastus, who lived 200 years before Mithridates. 
An example of learned absence of mind ! 

Note 52, page 179. 

Must not the tree, on the contrary, have first acquired its Greek 
name irv£og, from its use in the finer kinds of wood-carving and 
cabinet-making? There can be no doubt that the word belongs to 
TTTixrcrtj ; but the fundamental idea cannot be flexible, as Benfey sup- 
poses in his Dictionary of Roots, for the box-tree has exactly the oppo- 
site quality ; as little can it mean the crumpled, crooked shrub, as 
Grimm supposed, for 7rr»Wa> means just the contrary ; to fold, to dispose 
in layers, to splice, to fit boards together. Homer has already tttvx^q 



474 



JVOTES. 



for the layers of a shield, kv irivaici tttvxt$ for a folded tablet, 
on whose inner surface signs were engraved. Pindar has vjavuv 
TCTvxaig for the parts of a song fitting into each other, as in cunningly- 
wrought vessels, etc. If the tree took its name from such boxes and 
tablets made of its wood, it follows that trade introduced such objects, 
as well perhaps as blocks of the raw material, to the Greeks before 
they had ever seen the tree itself — a confirmation of the views expressed 
in the text. The name Kvrwpog, Kvrwpov, might be Greek and not 
barbaric, if it contains in ^Eolic form the very old word, which, as 
Konvoc, meant to the later Greeks the oleaster ; to the Latins, as 
cotinus, some shrub native to the Apennines ; and to the Sinopeans 
perhaps the buxus growing on their mountains. 

Note 53, page 180. 

Benfey, 2, 373. The m of the Semitic rimmon changed "by a very 
natural transformation " into the Greek digamma. Hesychius is still 
acquainted with the name pijxfiai for a sort of large pomegranates. (If, 
as he adds, the word was more correctly £i/i/3cu, and the preceding 
gloss : Zififipai' poiai Aio\e7g, were certain, other suppositions would 
arise.) The same Semitic word is to be found perhaps in the first 
part of opofictKxog (Schol. ad Nic. Ther. 869 : Xeyerai dk ofioiwg rj t£avBr}oig 
tCjv poiuv 6p6j3atcxog), or 6poj3a.Kxr) (Hesych. : 6poj3a.Kxv' (Soravr] rig' 01 de Trjg 
poiag rovg Kapnovg, ovg ivioi icvrivovg). Kvrivog is also used for the blossom 
from which the fruit is developed (Schol. ad Nic. Alex. 610 : kvtivov 
0a<7i to avdog Trjg poiag, oirtp a '£r)9ev poia yiveTai). On the verses of 
Nicander, Alex. 489 : 

(3pvK0t d' aWoTE Kaprrbv ukig (poivwdea rridrjg 
Kprjcridog, olvu)7rrjg ts icai rjv Tlpon'svfiov tirovai — 

the Scholiast remarks : olvu)7r>jg' ddog poiag icai olvadog icai irpo/jievuov 
d } eldog poiag, u>v6\iact 5' avTr)v atro Tivog Upo/xevov Kptjrog. With regard to 
o-ifidr), Pott (E. F., ed. 2, 4, 8i) calls attention to the Persic seb^pomum 
malum. From the name of the blossom, (BaXavaTiov (probably also an 
Oriental importation), it is well known that the Italian balaustro, 
balaustrata, and our balustrade are derived. 



Note 54, page 184. 

Fiedler {Reise, 1, 625), relates as follows : "When King Otto visited 

Thermopylae in 1834, an old woman brought him a fine pomegranate, 

and wished him as many happy years as there were pips inside it." 

This reminds one of Herodotus, 4, 143 : " When Darius opened a 



NOTES. 475 



pomegranate, and was asked of what things he would like to have 
as great a number as there were seeds in the fruit, he answered, as 
many true men like Megabazus, which he would value more highly 
than the conquest of Greece." Plutarch relates the same story 
(Regum et Imp. apophthegm, in.), but of Zopyrus. 

Note 55, page 189. 

The lilies said to have been found in Assyrian bas-reliefs (G. 
Rawlinson, "The Five Great Monarchies," 1, 440), were no doubt such 
icpiva, as well as those from which the chapiters of the columns in 
Solomon's temple were copied. Also the Kpiva that Phidias made on 
the mantle of the Olympian Zeus (Pausan., 5, 11, 1, if the text be 
correct) are not to be regarded as lilia Candida, but as conventional 
flower forms. The Egyptian rose-like tcpivta which grew in the river 
are explained to be Nymphcea nelumbo, L. 

Note 56, page 189. 

About podov, j3p6dov and the identical words in Armenian, Kurdic, 
etc., see the quotations in Pott, E. F., ed. 2, 2, 817. According to 
Spiegel {Beitrage, 1, 317), the Armenian vard leads to an Old Persian 
vareda, from which, with the loss of the final d, the present gul (rose, 
already found in the Huzvaresh) was formed in the regular way. 
Spiegel also disputes the Semitic origin of the word. Aeipiov= Persic 
laleh, lily, must undoubtedly be considered of Persian origin (Benfey, 
2, 137). Susa or Shushan, the winter capital of the Persian kings, 
was said to derive its name from the abundance of lilies in the 
neighbourhood ; for Persic aouaov= Greek tcpivov. 



Note 57, page 191. 
Rosa, according to Pott, from podka, rosebush, as the Italian popular 
language made Clausus out of Claudius, etc. Only instead of deriving 
it from the noun poSka, which would include a change of meaning, we 
would rather say that it came from the adjective poSka, podia. The 
rose is called from ancient times pooka tcakv%, rosy cup, already in the 
Hymn to Demeter ; KakvZ, being to distinguish the improved full rose 
from the wild. This was so common, that even koXvZ, by itself was 
understood to mean rose ; hence KaXvKoJirig Nvju^t; or Kovpi], nymph or 
maiden with rosy cheeks. And popular speech might, on the other 
hand, leave out the substantive, and say merely r) podka=rosa. Accord- 
ing to Hesychius the Macedonians had a peculiar word for /ose : aflayia' 



476 NOTES. 



poda ; Macedonia, indeed, was the fatherland of this cultivated plant 
as regards Europe. In Zeuss, p. 1076, ed. 2, there is for rosa an Old 
Cornish word breilu (Cambr. breila, breilw), the explanation and 
utilizing of which for the history of culture we must leave to experts 
in that language. Just as obscure is p. 163 the Cambrian gloss : 
ffaoiv (rosae). 

Lilium instead of lirium arose from the tendency to assimilation ; 
the modern Latin languages felt, on the contrary, the need of dis- 
similation, and said gigiio, lirio, etc. The Spanish and Portuguese 
azucena for white lily is from the Arabic, and therefore identical with 
the Old Testament Susan, Susannah, the word from which Stephen 
of Byzantium derives the name of the Persian capital Susa. The 
Arabs were fond of gardens and flowers. The modern Greeks have 
abandoned the word podov, and say the thirty leaved TpiavTCHpvXKta 
(Fraas, Synopsis, p. 76 ; so did latterly even the ancient Greeks, 
see Langkavel, Botanik der sfiat. Gr., p. 7), which word has also 
passed into Albanian ; the lily, icpivog, keeps pretty much its old name, 
which is used by the Wallachians, and was likewise adopted by the 
Old Slavic ecclesiastical language. 



Note 58, page 203. 

Latterly Hartmann, in the Zeitschrift fiir agyptische Sprache^. 21, 
1864, and Ebers (Aegypten unci die Biicher Mose's, 1, p. 267) have 
supposed that, for some reason unknown to us, the Egyptian painters 
may have been forbidden to copy camels ; but if the camel had 
existed in Egypt, it would not have been absent in the whole of North 
Africa down to the Roman time (see Barth, Wanderungen, p. 3-7). 
And fowls, to which Ebers appeals, were also a late importation ; see 
below, the section on the Domestic Fowl. Nothing can be determined 
from the dromedary bones said to have been found among other 
animal remains by borings made in Egyptian soil, this being an argu- 
ment much too vague and subject to a thousand possibilities. So we 
must continue to believe, that at the time specified Pharaoh cannot 
have given Abraham any camels, and probably, for other reasons, no 
asses (Gen. xii. 16) ; while the horse, which was also introduced into 
Egypt, but at a time that long preceded the Jewish recollections and 
writings, could not fail to be among the gifts. 

Note 59, page 204. 
Movers, in his Phonizier, Th. ii., at the beginning, is of the contrary 
opinion, and derives the Grecian name of the country, ») Qoivikt], from 



NOTES. 477 



foiviZ, the date-palm, because the ancients considered Phoenicia, 
Palestine, Idumasa, and Syria, to be countries rich in palms. But then 
what becomes of <poivi%, scarlet, which has evidently the same origin ? 
Gesenius, who was inclined to take <poivi%, purple, for the point of 
departure {Moment. Phoen., p. 338), could at least support his 
opinion by a tolerable Greek etymology {<j>ovq, <poivog, etc.). But how 
is <poivi%, palm, to be explained from the Greek ? Besides this, we 
have a decided reason in the fact that Homer knows the Phoenicians 
from of old, as a trading, sea-faring, and piratical people — we need 
only recall the history of the godlike swineherd Eumaeus — but he is 
still quite full of fresh admiration for the palm in Delos. QoiviZ, a 
Phoenician, can have arisen in no other way than from the native name 
of the country, which is handed down to us in the Hebrew form as 
Kanaan, Kenaan, and in the later Phoenician as Xva, 'Oxva. The 
initial letter, about whose pronunciation, at a time so far beyond all 
written documents, we know nothing, either changed from a guttural 
to a labial aspirate on the Greek tongue ; or, in some antique Semitic 
or semi-Semitic dialect, for example, that of the Philistines or Carians, 
if these were of Semitic race, the word began with a sound which in 
Europe was represented by <p. In the same way, at the media stage,, 
was formed from the Hebrew Gobel and Phoenician Gybl, the Greek 
Bu/3Xoc. That a shorter form was also used in ancient times is shown 
by the borrowed Latin Poenus, which in Greek would be <polvog. 

Note 60, page 205. 

Plin. 16, 240 : " Palma Deli ab ejus dent dei {Apollinis) aetate con- 
spicitur y" that is, the palm of Delos was still standing in the time of 
Pliny ! As the natural life of the date-palm is not so long, and the old 
tree must have been replaced by more than one successor after the 
time of Ulysses, this may well make us cautious about other cases,, 
where long-lived trees are said to have lived from the mythic and 
heroic ages. 

Note 61, page 208. 
Gesenius in the Thesaur., p. 345, finds in the Greco-Latin Palmyra 
a reproduction of the original, half according to sense and half 
according to sound, but without giving any likely reason for such a 
half-and-half proceeding. The Romans no doubt found the name 
already when they conquered Asia, and the Greeks of the Seleucid 
kingdom, if they were half-translating, would not have lugged-in a. 
Latin word palma. Movers (2, 3, p. 253) says : " I consider the name 
Palmyra a corruption of Tadmor." But as exactly the same " corrup- 



47 S NOTES. 

tion" took place with the old Latin word palma, we must find another 
name for the process. As for the change of d or t into / before an m, 
that is a very likely thing to happen ; witness fccid/xia, /cassia, and the 
Romance calamine, gial lamina, Germ. galmei; Patmos, now Palmosaj 
Arabic and Persic elmds, Russian almaz, diamond, from dddfiag ; the 
Zendic Haetumant, Greek Etymander, now the River Helmand, etc. 



Note 62, page 209. 

This wnaZiZ,, (nrddtKog — both vowels are long — is in so far a remark- 
able word, that it exactly corresponds to the meaning of <poivi%. It 
signifies a palm-branch with the fruit attached, then a red or reddish- 
brown colour, and lastly a musical instrument. Gellius (2, 26) declares 
the word to be Doric. " Spadica enim Doricivocant avulsum expahna 
termitem cumfructu " — therefore not the male stigma, the airdOr), but 
ratherthe cluster of dates. Accordingto Plutarch (Symp. 8, 4, 3) it meant 
the palm-branch, that is, the leaf with which the victor was crowned : 
Ka'iroi doKut fioi jJLvrjjiovtvuv iv Toig 'AttlkoIq dviyvojKwg evayxog, on Trpuirog tv 
Ar}\(ft Qi]oe.vg dywva 7roiwv dTrkoTtaas. ic\d$ov tov Upov (poivacog' y Kai (nrddi^ 
wvofidaOr]. A shorter form is seen in Hesychius : (nrd' to $vtov tov 
(poiviKOQ. Among Latin writers Virgil uses the word for the brown 
colour of horses, otherwise designated badius, Ital. bajo, French 
bed {Georg. 3, 82 : 

" Honesti 
Spadices glaucique : color deterrimus albi"). 

The ancients, as is shown by the above passages from Gellius and 
Plutarch, derived it from awdoj ; but it cannot be doubted that it is a 
word borrowed from the Semitic language. A later name for palm- 
branch, (3aig, ftaiov, used in the New Testament, comes from Egypt ; 
Old Egyptian bd, Coptic fSrjT (see Champollion, Gramm. egypt. i. 
p. 59 ; Benfey 2, 369). The proper Latin expression is that used by 
Gellius, termes, as the passage in Ammian. Marcell. (24, 3, 12) shows : 
" Et quaqua incesserit quisquam, termites et spadica cernit adsidua, 
quorum ex fructu mellis et vini conficitur abundantia." It was pro- 
bably formed from the Greek Hpfia, and meant the branch set up at 
the goal as the prize of victory. 



Note 63, page 212. 

Cyprus, the old station of the sea-farers, took its name from the 
cypresses that hailed the approaching mariner from afar, and whose 
timber was exported from the island. We know that other islands 



NOTES. 479 



have been named after trees ; for example, the Pityusae near Spain, 
from the fir-tree ttLtvq, or Madeira from its building material, a 
materie. Ritter — who at the beginning of his beautiful monograph 
assumes that cypresses were aboriginal in Afghanistan, and that they 
migrated thence with the ancient religion — is afterwards inclined to 
think that the tree was also native to Phoenicia, Canaan, and even the 
^Egsean islands (p. 577). But in that case would their naturalization 
in the similar climate of South Italy (see below in text) have been so 
difficult, and would the tree be there so plainly reduced in size and 
strength ? The latter fact is easily explained if we suppose a long 
and gradually declining series of climates, beginning with Afghanis- 
tan and ending to the north-west with the Apennines. Again, that 
the island of Crete can have been included in the original sphere of 
propagation of a tree that did not exist in Greece itself is hardly 
credible when we consider the similarity of natural conditions in the 
two. The cypresses on Lebanon may have been imposing, but as 
they cannot be compared to the giants in the western region of the 
Indus, they declare themselves but secondary and derived from the 
latter. 

Note 64, page 214. 

In other ways also the legends of the founding of Psophis (m 
Pausan. as above ; Steph. Byz. under Qriyua and "fruxpig) are signi- 
ficant. The reported change of name, as in the case of Kyparissia in 
Phocis, points to the commencement of a new epoch of culture ; the 
place once called Phegeia, Phegia, oak or beech-town, where Alphesi- 
boia, the bringer of oxen, had ruled, was now, on passing to the higher 
stage of tree-culture, named Psophis ; and who was Psophis ? The 
daughter of the Sikanian king Eryx, who bore to Herakles, the wan- 
dering fulfiller of works of culture, Echephron and Promachus. Here 
also, as in the legend of Meleager, a rude outbreak of the old forest 
life appears in the shape of a wild boar that devastates the gardens, 
and is overcome by Herakles. The necklace and peplos of Har- 
monia (Movers, 1, 509) ; Psophis as daughter of Eryx ; the worship 
of Aphrodite Erycina by the Psophidians ; and, lastly, the cypresses 
or virgins at the grave of Alcmaeon, all evidently point to Phoenician 
influence. Along what route this had come is taught by the con- 
nexion with Akarnania (where there was another Psophis ; Alcmaeon 
went to Akarnia, gave the country its name, and then returned), and 
with Zakynthos (where the castle was called Psophis, and was said to 
have been founded by Zakynthos, a Psophidian, and son of Dar- 
danos) ; that is, with seats of the Telebceans and Taphians, both 
of the Leleges kindred, who, as it seems, first sailed from Greece to 



4 8o NOTES. 



Sicily. The place Psophis must very early have invited men to the 
working of mines from the peculiar position of the mountain, which is 
exactly described by Polybius, 4, 70. E. Curtius (Peloponn., 1, 400) 
supposes that a legend of metamorphosis had attached itself to the 
Psophidian cypresses. It is a religious and poetical custom in the 
East, from the earliest to the latest times, to represent the cypress as 
inhabited by a female divinity, and to compare a virgin to the cypress. 
Goethe in the Westbstlicher Divan : 

" Verzeihe, Meister, wie du weisst, 
Dass ich mich oft vergesse, 

Wetin sie das Ange nach sich reisst^ 
Die wandelnde Cypresse, — 

An der Cypres se reins tern, jungem Streben, 
Allschbngewachsne, gleich erke?uj ich dich." 

A work by Lajard treats of the cypress as a mystic attribute from the 
artistic-archaeological point of view, after the manner of Creuzer : 
Recherches sur le culte du cypres pyramidal chez les peuples civilises de 
V antiquity Paris, 1854, in 4 . The various incidents in the myth of 
Kyparissos, the favourite of Apollo, scattered through the writings of 
the ancients were collected by Avellino (// Mito di Ciparisso, Naples 
1841, 4 ), to illustrate a Pompeian painting. 

Note 65, page 216. 

We cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of adding to Pliny's expres- 
sion : " Dotem filiae antiqui plantaria appellabant" the following 
passages from Hebel's Schatzkastlein : " If I had the choice between 
having a cow of my own, or a cherry or walnut tree, I would rather have 
the tree. . . . Such a tree eats neither clover nor oats. No, it quietly 
drinks like a child the nourishing juices of the earth, and imbibes 
warm life from the sunshine and freshness from the air, and shakes 
its locks in the storm. Besides, my cow might die early ; but a tree 
like that keeps its blossoms, its birds'-nests, and its bounty for child and 
grandchild. ... As soon as I have earned enough to buy a bit of 
land of my own, and marry the daughter of my mother-in-law, and 
God blesses me with offspring, I will plant for every child a little tree 
of its own ; and it must be called after the child, Louis, John, or 
Henrietta, and be its own first capital and fortune ; and I shall watch 
how they grow up and thrive together, and become more and more 
beautiful ; and how, in a few years, my little boy climbs up his capital, 
and draws his interest." Among the Arabs in Spain it was the custom 
on the birth of a child to dig a so-called silo in the ground, fill it with 



NOTES. 48] 



corn, and cover it up air-tight. In this subterranean bin the corn lay 
for many years, and became the child's property when he grew up 
(see Murphy's " History of the Mahometan Empire in Spain," p. 262, 
where the author refers to Jacob's " Travels in the South of Spain "), 
The same custom, but of course barbarized, prevailed among the Little 
Russians on the Dnieper. At the birth of a daughter a keg of brandy 
was buried in the earth, and when the girl was married it was taken 
up again, and emptied by the guests with glee ; and of course many 
another cask or pail filled with newer spirit was in readiness to keep 
up the enthusiasm. 

Note 66, page 222. 
Russian klerz, Polish klon, Czech, klen, Lith. kldvas, the maple ; O. 
Norse hlyrzr, hlinr (Schmeller, 2, 465), Mid. H. Germ, Iznbozwz, lim- 
boum, now lehnej O. Corn, kelzn, Cambr. kelyn, Armoric kelen, 
kelennen (Zeuss. ed. 2, p. 1077) ; Mid. Latin clenus. With this northern 
word compare a passage in Theophrastus, H. PL, 3, 11, 1 : 'iv fiiv di) 
{ysvoc) t(i> Koivtp irpogayopevovoi acpkudafivov, 'irtpov dk ^vy'iav, rpirov ok 
K-Xivorpoxov, tig 01 7repi Srayeipa. This klino-trochos was the name among 
the country-folk about Stagira, as Theophrastus had probably heard 
from his master ; perhaps the second half of the word, to judge by its 
first letters tr, expressed the notion of tree. Another Macedonian 
word yXzivov, yXivov (or yXelvog?), (Theophr. 3, 3, I : oQwdafivog, rjv lvp,ev 
T(p opu TTicpvKvlav Z,vyiav KaXovaiv, kv8eT<jj TreS'iy yXtivov ; 3, II, 2 : icaXovoi 
d' avT))v Ivioi yXuvov, ov G^ivdap,vov), must be related to the above. 
The Latin acer, aceris (for acesz's), seems identical with the " cLkuotoq' i] 
o-Qkvdaixvog" in Hesychius. It is known that the German Ahorn (0 be- 
cause it sounded like horn) was formed from the Latin acer, or rather 
from the adjective acernusj and from the German is derived the Slavic 
yavor. A native Slavic word for maple, repina (also Albanian), is 
formed from reply, thorn, like Latin acer and Greek blva from the root 
ak y sharp (see W. Tomaschek in the Zeitschrift f. d. oesterr. Gymn., 
1875, P. 529)- 

Note 67, page 229. 
Or was only the tongue of the scales made of a piece of cane ? or 
did measuring by the cane come first, and its name then, in the sense 
of rule, standard, get transferred to the scales ? The obscure rpyravi], 
Latin trutzna, is explained by the Slavic trustz, arundo, where the s 
arose regularly out of the // therefore Tpvravri also originally meant 
cane. 

Note 68, page 252. 
To illustrate more fully what has been said in the text, we add some 

3i 



482 NOTES. 



philological remarks that have occurred to us. Fr. Beckmann, in a 
learned essay on the origin and meaning of the name Elektron for 
Amber (in Zeitschr. fiir die Gesch. und Alterth. Ermlands, I. pp. 201, 
and 633, Mainz, i860), would derive both rjXitcTwp 'T7repia>v, and ijXetcrpov 
and aktKTpvojv from a\kw, a\l£a>, so that the notion of averting, ward- 
ing off, would lie at the bottom of all three. Now it is indifferent to 
our purpose, whether by the term ^XkrwjO the god was originally 
represented as beaming or as averting (something like 'A7r£\\wj/) ; the 
name for amber was certainly formed after that of the Sun-god. It 
proves nothing that in later times the elektron was used as a magic 
talisman and fantastic remedy, lor that was the case with a thousand 
other objects, and especially with all precious stones. Nor had the 
gemma alectoria any defensive or averting power ; it was serviceable 
to athletes only because it was said to be found in the stomach of the 
cock, and the latter is a pugnacious creature, dXsKTpvo)v naxifiog. 

The Latin gallus, gallina, are connected by Pott and Leo Meyer 
with the Greek dyye\\o>, ayyeXog, which obscure word appears even in 
Greek as only the remains of an obsolete root. It is difficult to believe 
that so late as 500 B.C. the word gallus was suddenly formed in Italy 
from a similar verb not otherwise known there. Curtius has supposed, 
with more probability, that gallus is an assimilation of gar-lus from 
garrio, yripvu. But gar-lus would also be a too antiquated form, as the 
root would here appear without the suffix which had long grown to it, 
as in garrulus. Besides, neither garrire nor yrjpvsiv is ever used of 
the voice of the cock ; and the corresponding but reduplicated Slavic 
glagolati, to speak, goes to form quite a different bird's name ; galica, 
galka, jackdaw, the chattering bird. If we compare the Latin galla, 
and the Greek ktikiq, both meaning gall-nut, we cannot help supposing 
that in gallus also there is hidden an assimilated guttural, and that the 
cock was so called mimetically, as the cackling bird. Hesych. tcdica' 
KaKia rj opveov. 

The German hana is generally compared to the Latin cano, ce-cin-i, 
which verb is used exactly for the crowing of the cock {galli-cinium, 
cock-crowing, canorum animal gallus gallinaceus). The same verb is 
also extant in Old Celtic, and, reduplicated as in Latin. The same 
root is found in Greek in extended form : Kavaxv, KavaZ,u, Kova- 
fiog, and in the verse of Cratinus it is used of the cock : Kavax^v 
6\6<pu)vog aKeKTup. But it is suspicious that of the verb hanan, here 
presumed, there is no trace either in the Germanic, Lithuanian, or 
Slavic languages ; and further, that the oldest and most genuine 
German word for the crowing of a cock is hruk, hrukjan, still used 
by Goethe of the cooing of the pigeon: 



NOTES. 483 

" Da kommt 
Dahergerauscht ein Taubenpaar 
Und ruckt einander an." 

So that the doubt remains, whether the German hana be not some 
borrowed Southern name. If a word was extant anywhere, like that in 
the gloss of Hesychius : i\iKavbQ' 6 aXucrpvuv (explained by Gerland as 
early-chanter, Pott, E. F., ed. 2, 4, 283), the German word would not 
be so strikingly isolated. 

With the Armoric, North-French and A. Saxon coq, cocc, Finnish 
and Esth. kukko, kuk, agrees the North-German word for the young 
brood, O. Norse kyklingr, A. Saxon cicen, cycen, frequent in Low 
German, whence, in the form kiichlein, it has now passed into High 
German. This word strictly stands aloof from the Gothic qius, our 
quick, and all that holds of these, by its different initial and different 
vowel, though, from the similarity of the sounds, they may now and 
then have been confounded. But the same word appears in old 
Greece as the true popular expression for the chanting and crowing of 
the cock. Sophocles called the cock kokkv(36ciq oping (Fr. 718, Nauck.) ; 
in Aristophanes, Cratinus (Meineke 2, 1, 186 : kokkv&iv tov aXucrpvov 
uvk avixovrai), and Theocritus, popular poets, kokkv^oj, KOKKvadui, is the 
unforced expression for the crow of the cock, and was also used by 
the orators Hyperides and Demosthenes (Poll. 5, 89). The gockel- 
hahn, etc., of Upper Germany, may be derived from the French. 

A similar, but not identical, name is spread through another region, 
namely, the wide Slavo-Byzantine world : Slav, kokotii, gallus, kokosha, 
kokoshi, gallina, Wallach. coeds, Magyar kakas, Albanian kokos, Mod. 
Greek kokotoq (with corrupt by-forms, Russ. kdtchet, Albanian kapos). 
The Sanskrit kukkuta, gallus, is too distant, both in time and space 
to be taken into account. 

Only among a portion of the Slav nations, which also form a sepa- 
rate group in point of language, do we find the O. Slav, pietlic, 
Servian piyetao, Croat. fieteli?i, Eussian (with another suffix) petukh. 
Agreeing with it in sense are the Lith. gaidys (singers from gedoti, to 
sing, whence also gas li, the well-known stringed instrument gusli), and 
the Albanian kendees (from the verb kendoig, I sing, which is probably 
the Latin cantare borrowed). 

An Old Celtic name for the cock, besides cere, is furnished by 
Zeuss's " Cornish Vocabulary," p. 1074 : chelioc, colyek, O. Irish 
coileachj Zeuss doubtingly explains it as salax, pp. 849 and 816. The 
" ealocatanos=papaver silvestre,' 7 occurring in Marcellus Empiricus 
(E. Meyer, Geschichte der Botanik, 11, p. 312), would here find its 
desired explanation, as cock-flower, like coquelicot, see Diez sub v. ; 



484 NOTES. 



Von Martens (Italien 2, 40) says the purple-violet flowers of the 
Campanula speculum, L., are called in the district of Verona cantaga- 
letti or cuchetti. 

There is also no want of obscure and isolated names in Europe ; as 
the Old Cambrian, Cornish, and Breton iar, yar, hen ; and with the 
same meaning the Lith. viszta, Lettish vista. In O. Prussian the cock 
was called gertis, the hen gerto, and the hawk gertoanax. 

Certainly many of the above expressions are only onomatopoeia. 
But the explanation by independent imitations of sound is not alone 
sufficient. It is contradicted by the circumstance that these names 
appear evidently in sequence and in zones, and by their too close 
agreement. If they had not migrated, but had arisen spontaneously 
in each place, there would be found a much greater variety, for every 
nation hears differently, and loves different combinations of sounds. 
On the other hand, nothing is more easily picked up by one nation 
from another than onomatopoeia, interjections, ejaculations, emphatic 
and elementary expressions of every kind. And if the wandering 
trader or physician — those two great missionaries of culture among 
unfriendly barbarians — if the captured slave or abducted maiden had 
been used to designate the cock in their mother tongue, as, for example, 
the singer, they would name it and interpret it no otherwise to the 
barbarians, as soon as they got a smattering of their language. So 
the Greek kXw&iv, Latin glocire, glocitare, to cluck (Columella, 5, 4 : 
" Glocie?itibus j sic enim appellant rustici aves eas quae volunt incu- 
dare"), cannot have spread so far through all European languages, 
even the Slavic, without the help of borrowing. 



Note 69, page 262. 
In the word 7ripicrrepd, tame pigeon, which appeared late, Benfey (2, 
106) discovered a superlative and comparative form of prz, to love, so 
that it meant "much enamoured." We prefer to connect it with 
Slav, pero, penna, firati, pariti, volare ; Zend, fiarena, perena, feather, 
wing, Mod. Persic par j Kurd, per; O. H. Germ, farn or farm, 
A. Saxon /earn (fern being the feathery plant ; reduplicated in Lith. 
and Slavic : Lith. papartis, Polish paproc, Russian paporot ; Old 
Gallic ratis, in Celtic fashion for pratis, O. Irish rath, raith, O. 
Corn, reden, Cambr. rhedyn). Pott, in his first E. F., explained 0<ty 
?>a/3o£, by Qkpopai, to fear ; an assimilated guttural must be hidden in 
0a<7<7«, to which then the Mid. Greek <j>&xnTf to. aijxa rrjg ^cW^-, the 
Mid. Latin facha, facheta, fakecha, and even Oriental names, would 
have a resemblance (see Pott in Lassen's Zeitschr. iv. 28— Diefenbach 
G. W. sub v. ahaks). An O. Russ. faza, palumbes, is thought by 



NOTES. 485 



Miklosich {Fremdworter in der Slavischen Spr. p. 87) to be the Greel; 
<paaaa borrowed. With the Prussian keutaris, ring-dove, agree the 
O. Cornish cudon, Cambr. ysguthan, O. Irish a'adc/tolu7n=pa\umbt> 
(Zeuss, ed. 2, 1074) ; also, to our surprise, the Prussian floalzs, pigeon, 
with the Greek neXtta, palumbus. The Slavic golabi looks too like the 
Latin not to be. borrowed from the language of the rulers of the world 
and Christendom, especially as in the Lithuanian gulbe, swan, we have 
the form and sense in which alone the word could be original in those 
Eastern parts. The softening of c into g, not unheard of in other 
cases, is of little weight against the historical reasons that speak for the 
word being borrowed. We cannot yet determine whether the Goths 
received their enigmatic ahaks (7rtpiaTepd) from the European West, or 
from the Asiatic East (Diefenbach sub. v. ; compare also O. Irish caog, 
jackdaw (St., Ir. Gl. 201), and Lith. kogas, carrion crow). The Lithua- 
nian has two other names for a pigeon, both it seems of merely local 
use : karvelis and balandis. I do not know if the latter can be identi- 
fied with the Ossetic baldn (in the other dialect baldn 9 baluon) ; it has 
also passed into Livonian (Wiedemann in the Bulletin der P etersburger 
Akademie,^. 694, 1859), while the Lettic and Esthonian names for the 
tame pigeon are derived from the German. The Lithuanians and 
Slavs name the heath-cock from its deafness : Lith. kurtinys, deaf 
and heath-cock ; from Slavic glukhii, deaf, come the Russ. glukhari, 
Pol. gluszec, Sloven hluchan, etc., heath-cock. But as this bird in 
breeding time really seems as if deaf, the relation of taub, deaf, to 
taube, dove, must be different. 

Note 70, page 265. 
When Clytus the Aristotelian, in his work on Miletus (in Athen. 
12, p. 540), relates that Polycrates brought together in Samos the pro- 
ducts of all countries (virb rpvQrjg ra iravTaxoQev avvdyuv' Kvvag /xev IK 
'H.7rsipov, aiyag 8k Ik ~2,Kvpov, Ik de MiXyjtov 7rp6j3aTa } ig ds Ik 'EiKsXLagj, we 
see that the tyrant was bent upon improving the breeds of animals, 
though it was set down to mere luxury (rpv^rj) ; but there is nothing 
about the peacock to be inferred from the report. It may have been 
passed over for one of two opposite reasons, either because it already 
existed in the island, or because it was still unknown to Polycrates and 
the Samians ; it is also a mere creature of luxury, which might indeed 
have suited Tpv<prj, but had nothing to do with the really economic 
labours of the tyrant. 

Note 71, page 265. 
As Antiphon was executed in the year 411, the "thirty years 



486 NOTES. 



and more " would take us back to an earlier date than we have sup- 
posed (440) for Athens's first acquaintance with the peacock. But the 
oration on peafowls can hardly be by Antiphon himself ; it was more 
likely made after his death, though not long after. 

Note 72, page 286. 

It is interesting to observe how new and popular names were 
created for the falcon in the earliest Middle Ages, when falconry became 
a favourite pastime. These names then migrated from land to land. 
One of the Mid. Latin names, which is first met with in Servius, was 
falco, which passed into most European languages ; its model was 
the Greek apirt], which signified both a bird of prey and a sickle. 
Accipiter was traced to accipere, and therefore used also in the form 
acceptor, as though it meant the receiver of the bird when it flew up ; 
and in the same way habich, hawk, was supposed to come from 
haben, to have. From capere was formed a short name quite common 
in Mid. Latin, capus; the note in Servius declaring that it was an 
old Etruscan word — in which case it must have suddenly reappeared 
after centuries of disuse — and that Capua was named after it, can only 
be received with a shake of the head. For the Spanish gavilan, 
perhaps derived from capus, see Diez in the Dictionary. The Mid. 
Latin gyro falco, so called from circling (gyrus, gyrare), Italian 
girfalco, French gerfaut, gave the Germans their geier (see Diez). A 
very widespread European word, sacer — and probably also the German 
weihe, O. H. Germ, wio, wigo, wiho — is simply a mistranslation of 
the Greek lepa% (quasi Upog) : Mid. Latin sacer, Italian sagro, French 
and Span, sacre, Mid. H. Germ, sackerfalk, Mid. Greek vdicpE. The 
same word penetrated the East : Arabic sakr, Persic sonkor, Kurd. 
sakkar, Slav, sokolii, Lith. sakalas. In Aristotle aoTtpiag, starred, 
spotted, is a mere attributive to \kpa%, but it is also used substantively 
as the name of a kind of bird of prey. The same word appears quite 
late in Latin in the form astur (the ending probably occasioned by 
vultur, or the national name Astur, an Asturian) ; from this is formed 
in an irregular manner, to avoid the similarity of sound with astro, 
star, the Italian astore, Provencal austor, O. French ostor, now autour 
(which Diez prefers to derive from acceptor, in which case also the 
words would not be according to rule), and the Slavic words for 
hawk ; Slav, yastrqbu, Serv. yastreb, yastrob, Russ. yastreb, Pol. 
jastrzqb, etc. The Lithuanian and Lettish name wannagus, wan- 
nags, for falcon, is evidently borrowed from the Germanic languages ; 
it is a sacred bird of prey, " for whom wannen (tubs) used to be hung 
outside the houses to build his nest in " (Grimm, p. 50), O. H. Germ. 



NOTES. 4*7 



•wannoweho, wannunwechel, Latin tinunculus from Una, vessel. 
Wanne itself is borrowed from the Latin vannus : word and custom 
were Italian. In Layard's book, mentioned in the text, we find on 
p. 366 and following, not only full and very interesting accounts of 
falconry as now practised in the East, but also a number of names 
for the species and varieties used there. Among these, tchark is 
probably the Greek Kipicog, Slavic kretchet. This tchark, the common 
falcon of the Bedouins, " seizes his prey on the ground, except the 
eagle, at which he is flown in the air. It chases principally gazelles 
and trappes, but also hares and other game." This, then, is hunting 
hares with falcons, just as Ktesias relates ; when gazelles are hunted, 
greyhound and falcon usually work together. 



Note 73, page 293. 

In his Synopsis Flora classicae, Fraas incorrectly states that the 
ancients were already acquainted with the white mulberry. ^Eschylus 
only speaks of white, reddish, and dark-red berries hanging in diffe- 
rent stages of maturity at the same time on the tree : ravrov xpwov \ 
Ovid in his fable only explains the origin of the red colour, just as 
he makes the black feathers of the raven proceed by metamorphosis 
from the former white ones ; the Geoponica, 10, 69, only tells how to 
give mulberries a white colour by grafting on a XtvKi], that is, a white 
poplar, one of the tricks of which that collection is full. Throughout 
the Middle Ages there is no certain trace of the Morus alba to be 
found in Europe — see Ritter, Erdkunde, 17,495, wno m vam sought 
for such. Also in Albertus Magnus, De Vegetabilibus, 6, 143, only the 
Morus nigra is described, not the Morus alba, as the latest editor 
supposes. 

Note 74, page 298. 

If corylus, corulus, arose in Latin fashion from cosilus, and is there- 
fore the O. H. Germ, hasal, hazel, and the O. Gallic cosl (Zeuss, ed. 2, 
p. 1077), Kauravov might be the same word in a Pontic language, only 
with another suffix. The Albanian arre, nut, nut-tree, reminds us of 
the glosses in Hesychius : dpva' rd ^paK\su>riK icdpva, and avapd' rd 
■KovTiKd Kdpva. As there is a dialectic by-form kharre, arre must have 
dropped its k, and is therefore the same word as icdpvov. The Slav. 
orachii, orechu, Lith. reszutas, reszutys, nut, carries us back to Persia : 
aragh, nut. Even Diez knows nothing certain about the Romance 
expressions, Italian marrone, French marron. According to Movers. 
!> 578, 586, dfivySaXr) was the Semitic name of the Phrygian Cybele, 



488 NO TES. 



and meant great mothers in fact, the wakeful almond tree, that is, 
the early-blooming, the first to wake from the winter's sleep, sprang 
from the blood of the mother of the gods. The Laconic fivmipoc, 
fiovieripoQ, nut almond, which seems to be identical with the rare Latin 
nuceres, nucerum (gen. pi., Ccelius in Charis, I, 40), points to a native 
Greek derivation. If we compare it with /tvtnrw, fiv^a, Latin mucus, 
the meaning would be soft, shiny fruit, just as a kind of plum was 
called ?nyxa, myxum. 

Note 75, page 303. 
The mistletoe, O. H. Germ, mistil, was a very sacred Drnidical 
plant, and the very slight traces in the German myth of a similar 
regard for it can only be a reflex from the Celtic land, especially as 
the Slavonian popular religion altogether disregards the mistletoe. 
The word also is probably a stranger in Germany, and the same as 
viscus, visculuss but we will not decide where the change of the v 
into m took place. Another plant used by the Druids for superstitious 
healing was called samolus (Diefenbach O. E. 416) ; if we imagine 
this word afterwards stripped of its initial s (by transition into h), it will 
agree with the Lithuano-Slavic names of the mistletoe : Lith. amalis, 
emalas, Lett, dmuls, Pruss . emelno, Slav, omela. The French griotte, 
sour cherry, is agriotta in Italian, and therefore derived from acers 
?nerise i bird-cherry, seems, like the Italian amarina, amarasca, 
marasca, to refer to amarus, bitter. In the Magyar language the 
sour cherry is medgy, the cherry-tree medgyfa — whence comes this ? 

Note 76, page 311. 
Late writers have supposed that this rhododendron of Pliny was 
one of our kinds of rhododendron, as Tournefort thought, or the 
Azalea Pontica (see E. Meyer, Botanische Erlauterungen zu Strado's 
Geographze, p. 59 ; and Langkavel, Botanik der spateren Griechen, 
p. 65). One may ascribe the bad effects of the Pontic honey as a 
fact to whatever plant one likes ; but by rhododendron the ancients 
always meant the Nerium oleander, and one has no right to substitute 
any other plant of which they did not mean to speak and could not 
have spoken. 

Note 77, page 311. 
We are prevented from believing with the latest editor, O. Ribbeck, 
in the authenticity of the " Culex," by the character of the poem, 
which evinces rather conceited over-ripeness than youthful immaturity. 
The very first verses could only be written by one who had already 
seen the Georgics and /Eneid, or at least the Eclogues : 



NOTES. 489 



" Posterius graviore so?io tibi musa loquetur 
Nostra, dabunt quoin maturos mihi temporafructus y 
Ut tibi digna tuo poliantur carmina sensuj " 

and remind us of Frederick the Great's speech to his generals at the 
beginning of the Seven Years' War : " Now we open the Seven Years' 
War ! " The very word rhododaphne is suspicious ; if the young Virgil 
had known it, we should have read it in later poets, for example, in 
Ovid, especially as it fits hexameter verse. 

Note 78, page 312. 

So thinks Benfey, 2, 79, who explains irio-raKii, irujTaKiov as rich 
in flour. From the gloss in Hesychius : /3i'<rra£* 6 (3a<ri\evg TrapaIlep<Taig, 
early writers thought the word meant as much as regiae nuces, as Kapva 
fiamXaca was used for a kind of nut or walnut (Persic peshddd, Pehlvi 
pes/tddt, Zend, paradhdta). The first letter is by turns 7r, $, /3, and 
even "*" ; according to Steph. Byz. there stood on the Tigris a town 
yriTTcucr], so-called from the Pistacios that grew there. TipspivOog, 
TspfiivOog, is probably also a Persian word, to which the change of b 
into m points, a change that commonly took place in transferring 
Persian names to Greek. See Pott, Kurdische Studien, in Lassen's 
Zeitschr., 6, p. 63. The Kurdic dariben there quoted can hardly be 
borrowed from the Greek, for it is a mighty forest-tree native in 
Kurdistan. Polak, Persien, 2. 155, says: "Besides numerous 
terebinth-trees, which furnish the well-known sakkes-resin, Kurdistan 
possesses large oak-forests. 

Note 79, page 339. 

The cultivation of oranges has now become an important branch of 
production in Italy. According to Langenbach's lecture before the 
Berlin Geographical Society, Nov. 2, 1872, Palermo exported twenty- 
two million kilogrammes of fruit in 1864, and thirty-seven millions in 
1867 ; the present quantity is about sixty million kilogrammes. Two- 
thirds of this fruit is sent to the United States. 

• Note 80, page 343. 

y£lian — no great authority, it is true — declares the word to be 
Iberian, N. A., 13? 15 : kovik\oq ovop.a avrqH' ovk eifit 8k 7roii)ni]g ovo^ariov, 
Wiv Kai iv rySt Ty avyypacpy (pvXarru) ti)v iirujvvfiLav tt\v t£ apx>js, tfv7rep cZv 
'lfiriptQ oi '~E<T7T£pioi tOtvTO ot, 7rap' o'tQ Kai yiviTai ts Kai tan irdfnro\vg. The 
Iberian race, its branches and their distribution, its language in its 



49Q 



MOTES. 



oldest remains and in its present modern condition, are still awaiting 
a Caspar Zeuss who shall raise them, by the means and methods of 
modern science, out of the obscurity in which they are hidden, as Zeuss 
did the origin of the Central European nations, and the language of 
the Celts. But since W. Humboldt the Basque language has been left 
in the hands of French and Spanish dilettanti ; in Germany, where 
formal preparation might be expected, only the primitive history of the 
Germans has flourished much since Zeuss, yet the boundaries marked 
out by that great inquirer more than forty years ago have scarcely 
anywhere been shifted or overthrown. From out the flood of opposing 
hypotheses and corrections, his " Germans and the neighbouring 
races " has always re-emerged. One example may serve ; what is 
become of our Mongoliaii Scythians ? have they not become Iranians 
again, as Zeuss, with a few master-strokes, made them out to be? 
The Orphic verse, which Stockes applied to his Celtic grammar : 

Zevg apxv, Zti>£ fi'&ooa, Aidg c' £K irdvra rirvKTai, 

is applicable also to that ethnographic work, which was left in the 
background, while the rival "History of the German Language" passed 
through several editions, and its contents into popular hand-books — no 
good sign ! Would that part of the busy and generally vain efforts 
thus expended had been bestowed upon the Iberians or Albanians, a 
field where the piled-up and half-buried ruins promise the richest 
discoveries ! 

Note 8i, page 345. 

All that zoology can at present tell us regarding the original distri- 
bution of the lepus cuniculus is to be found complete in the learned 
monograph by J. F. Brandt : Researches on the Rabbit, etc. {Melanges 
Biologiques of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences, T., 9, 1875). As 
the rabbit easily runs wild, and then becomes so like the really wild 
animal that no difference can be discovered (p. 481), it is impossible 
to draw any conclusions from its present distribution. It is true that 
fossil remains of the rabbit from the diluvial time are said to be found 
in Western Europe from Portugal to England and Germany ; but that 
is long ago, and the increasing cold in the North meanwhile destroyed 
the animal, which is very sensitive to a low temperature. It cannot 
have existed in a wild state in Greece and Italy within historic times, 
because in that case the Greeks and Romans would not have passed 
it over in silence ; on the other hand, it is present in all Iberian 
countries, and closely connected with the Iberian race. 

It is related of the tyrant Anaxilas of Rhegium, who also conquered 
the town of Zankle (afterwards called Messana) that he naturalized the 



NOTES. 491 

hare in Sicily, and therefore had his coins stamped with the figure of 
that animal. Was the hare wanting in the island until that time? 
One might suppose that rabbits were meant, which the tyrant had 
colonized near Messina, but the coins distinctly show a hare in full 
career. 

A Greek name for the rabbit, Xifapig, which Strabo does not limit to 
any district (tojv ynopv^^v Xayid'eiov ovg tvioi Xeftrjpidag Trpogayopevovm), is 
declared by Erotianus, following Polemarchus, to be Massaliote : o 
'Pcj/xaloi /xev kovvikXov icaXovcn, MaaaaXiwrat Se Xsj3i]pida. If there really 
was an ^Eolic, that is, Old Greek word Xe7ropig for hare, there might 
grow up out of it, among the early Greek colonists on the coasts of 
Spain and Provence, a Xsj3i]pig, with a soft labial, as Xt(5r}pig, in the 
other sense of skin, slough, is related to Xetuv, to peel, Xoirug, husk, 
shell. But if the Latin lepus was the only root, we should have here 
one of those words which appeared in the Sicilian-Italiote colonial 
language, namely, a Grecianized latin term, whose form was deter- 
mined by Xiprjplg, skin ; but then it would not be exclusively Massaliote. 
It is very remarkable that laurix, which disappeared in the Romance 
languages and in Middle Latin, is found again in O. H. German 
glosses : lorichi, lorichin, with the meaning of cuniculus. If laurix 
was only another form or pronunciation of Xtj3rjpig — and ground enough 
for such a supposition might be found in the dialects, unknown to us, 
spoken between Gades and Massilia — then either laurix must also be 
a Grasco-Roman, or Xef3r)pig also an Iberian word. The English rabbit, 
and French rabouillere, rabbit-hedge, are derived from a Celtic name 
(see Muller, Etymol. Worterb. der Etiglischen Sprache). The distor- 
tion of cuniculus in the Li thuano- Slavic languages makes a pretty 
contribution to Folk-etymology : Lith. kralikkas ; Russ. korolek, 
krolik ; Pol. krolik, etc., that is, little king. Charlemagne surely 
never dreamt that his name would serve to distinguish the rabbit on 
the other side of the Oder ! But perhaps these expressions are only 
translations of the kuniglein, common in older German, Mid. H. 
Germ, kiinoll (see Pott, Doppelung, p. 82), forms that also owe their 
existence to Folk-etymology. 



Note 82, page 347. 

"When Alkmena," relates Antoninus Liberalis, 29, "could not give 
birth to Herakles because the Moirai and Eileithyia hindered the birth, 
Galinthias (in Ovid, Met., 9, 306, she is called Galanthis) tricked the 
goddesses so that the child was born ; for which she was punished, by 
being changed into a weasel, yaXij. But Hekate pitied her, and made 
her her own sacred servant. And when Herakles was grown up, he 



492 NOTES. 



remembered her help, erected a sanctuary to her, and sacrificed to 
her. The Thebans observe the custom to this day, and before the 
feast of Herakles they first sacrifice to Galinthias ." ^Elian, N.A., 
15, 11, on the other hand, relates : " I have heard that the weasel was 
once a woman, practised magic and poisonings, and was unbridled in 
illicit love ; the anger of the goddess Hekate changed her into this 
wicked animal. This I have heard tell." Contrariwise, in the 32nd 
Fable of Babrius, the weasel is changed by Aphrodite into a beautiful 
girl, who, on her wedding day, betrays what she really is — a weasel. 
The Comic poet, Strattis, who exhibited plays from 01. 92 to 01. 99, 
alludes to this fable. (Meineke, Fr. con. gr., 2, 2, 790.) 

This tale of transformation has travelled far, and is echoed in the 
names borne by the weasel in many European languages. It is called 
the little maiden; Ital. donnolaj Mod. Greek wfupvra ; Germ, s.chbn- 
thie?'lein, pretty beastie, schbndinglein, pretty little thing ; Danish 
den kjbnne, the beauty ; O. Eng. fairy ; Span, comadreja, cummer 
gossip (=commatercula) ; Basque andereigerra (an drea= woman), 
Albanian "the brother's wife," Slav, lastotchka, the friendly or de- 
ceitful (from laskati, to flatter, listiti to deceive ; the swallow is called 
so too), Slav, nevestuka, bride or maiden, etc. In many Italian 
dialects the names are derived from the Latin belhda (see Flechia in 
the Archivio glottologico Italiano II. p. 47). Ness (Zeuss, ed. 2, 49), and 
eds (St., I. Gl., 259) are Celtic words, the latter, if it has lost an initial 
v (Zeuss, ed. 2, 55), is perhaps identical with O. H. Germ, wisula, wisala. 
The Cornish-Breton names quoted by Zeuss, ed. 2, 1075, seem to contain 
the notion of merry, quick. Very obscure names are the Portug. 
touraoj Span, garduna, Lith. zebenksztis (rather the brown weasel), 
szarmonys, szermonys (rather the white, identical with Germ, hermelin, 
ermine, from harm) ; O. Pruss. mosuco (Germ, mbsch, miisch, perhaps 
like Mus Moscoviticus) Albanian bukljeza. They may contain euphe- 
mistic circumlocutions ; for the weasel, because of its swiftness and 
subterranean habits, is imagined as a daemonic animal, and such a one 
must not be named, or it will appear. The Latin felis appears in the 
Cymric bele, martin, from which comes the French belette, weasel (see 
Diez, sub v., and Diefenbach, O. E., p. 259) ; Germ. Mile, bilch?naus, 
O. H. Germ, pilihj Lith. pelej Old Pruss. peles, mouse ; Slav, pluchii, 
dormouse, etc. 

Note 83, page 351. 

Fr. Muller, in the Sitzungsber. der Philosophisch-histor. Klasse der 
Wiener Acad. t vo\. xlii., p. 250, 1863, translates the Zendic gadhwa, 
which often occurs in the Vendidad, by " cat ; " and Spiegel, in Kuhn's 
Zeitschrift, 13, 369, agrees with him. To this Justi objects, that the 



NOTES. 493 



Huzvaresh translation gives " dog" for gad/twa, and that the cat first 
appeared in Asia during the MicL'.le Ages. And, in fact, all the Asiatic 
names of the animal, both in the Semitic languages and in Armenian, 
Ossetic, Persic, Turkish, etc., are in the last instance derived from 
Byzantine Greek, which itself borrowed its name from the Latin. It 
is significant for the chronology of the word, that catus exists in all 
the Romance languages except Wallachian alone : it came up when 
Dacia was already the prey of the barbarians, and the Latin spoken 
there was isolated. On other forms that are pretty widely diffused, 
Ital. 7tiicio^ Germ, mieze, Slav, matchika, etc., see Diez, Weigand, and 
Miklosich under the words. As the meaning of "little Mary" is 
hidden in the German miezchen, and " little Matthias " in the Bohemian 
macek, so in Russia the cat is called vasika, little Basil, or ??zishka, 
little Michael. (See also Albert Hofer, Deutsche Name?i des Katers, 
in the Germania, 2, 168 ; and Grimm's Dictionary, with regard to the 
name duse, frz'se, widely spread among Germans and Celts). 



Note 84, page 352. 

Here we follow the common opinion, namely, that tasso, taxo, taxus r 
badger, came from the German into the Romance and Middle Latin lan- 
guages. Grimm, in his Grammatik, 2, 40, derives the word dachs, badger,, 
from the Mid. H. Germ, verb dehsen, to swingle flax, linum vertere, cir- 
cumagere. This dehsen^ with the frequent Teutonic addition of an 
s, is identical with Lith. tekmti^ to turn, Slav, totchiti circumvolvere, 
tokari, turner ; and, like deichsel, A. Sax. thisl, thill or pole of a waggon, 
and Gothic thaho, clay — that is, stuff to be formed or turned ; it runs 
into the large many-branched stem to which rsxvn, tektojv, rsvxw, rvKog, 
etc., belong. The badger was called the turner because he digs his 
house in the earth, and is therefore an artist, an architect. This ex- 
planation is supported by the Greek rpoxog in Aristotle, De Gener. 
Anim.) 3, 6, in which word lies, not only the simple meaning of 
runner, but also of turner, one who runs round (compare rpoxog wheel, 
potter's- wheel ; the lanfer runner, in the mill, i.e., upper stone, and 
among rope-makers, etc.) 

But there is a doubt whether dachs was not rather Celtic, and the 
animal already popular among that people. The fat of the badger, to 
which popular superstition attributed particular effects, is already 
praised by Serenus Sammonicus : 

11 Nee sperne?idus adeps- t dederit quern bestia meles" 

where meles can only mean the badger. Marcellus Empiricus also- 
prescribes a dose of badger-fat, adifiis laxoninae j at that rate, the 



494 



NOTES. 



German word must have found its way into Latin by the fourth century. 
Still farther back, about ioo B.C., is the quotation from Afranius in 
Isidore, 20, 2 : " Taxea lardum est G alike dictum; unde et Afranius 
in Rosa: ' Galium sagatum pingui pastum taxea?" Nourished on 
badger's fat ? 

Other names for this animal lead us no farther. The English say 
badger — that is, corn-trader ; the French likewise blaireau — that is, 
bladarius; the Italians say grajo (perhaps the same as agrarius) ; 
the Scandinavians and Netherlanders gravling, grevinc — that is, 
digger, all euphemisms. The Danish-Swedish brock is the same in 
English, and broch in Cambrian and Cornish ; if this be a case of 
borrowing, did the word run with the parallels of latitude from east to 
west — that is, from Scandinavia to Britain, say, with the incursions of 
the Danes ; or in the opposite direction, from the ancient Britons to 
the North Germans ? The Russian barsuk, Polish borsuk, seems of 
Persian or Turkish origin, as bars (leopard) is an Asiatic word ; with 
the latter agrees the Magyar borz, badger. The Slavic yazvii and the 
Lithuanian words : O. Pruss. wobsdus, Lith. obszrus, Lett. apsis t are 
obscure, though they certainly were full of meaning once. 

The late arrival of the Hamster from the East is unmistakable. It 
is still wanting in many parts of Germany, but is frequent in the corn- 
growing countries of Eastern Europe. From the Russian kkomiak, 
Polish chomik, and still more closely from the " chomestaru^ animal 
quoddam," noted by Miklosich, is derived from the German ha?nster, 
O. H. Germ, hamastro, hamistro. Also the Russian karbysch, hamster, 
sounds as if derived from a Tartar source. The O. Pruss. dutkis, and 
Lith. balesas, cannot be understood. 

Note 85, page 352. 
The same is true of the productions of language : our language availed 
its-elf of the difference between the High German and the Low German 
stage of consonant to distinguish between katze, female cat, and kater, 
male cat ; and added, by a kind of vowel-change, Die Katze kiezt, hat 
gekiezt, the cat has kittened. 

Note 86, page 355. 
The Greek povftaXii;, (3ov(3aXog, is undoubtedly roe, antelope, gazelle, 
and not an animal of the Neat kind. We find already in ^Eschylus, 
Fr. 322, Nauck : 

XeovTOxoprav fiovfiaXiv vsairepov, 
the young antelope which serves as food for the lion. To those 



NO YES. 495 



animals, says Aristotle, De Part. Amm. t 3, 2, whose horns are useless 
for defence, Nature gave another means of safety, speed — thus to 
stags, antelopes, (3ov(3d\oig, roes, Sopicdai, which last occasionally stand 
at bay and threaten with their horns, but take flight before strong 
beasts of prey. These animals are especially native to Africa. There, 
according to Herodotus, 4, 192, live irvyapyoi ical Zopicddsg /cat j3ovj3d\isg 
Kal ovoi, and Polybius, 12, 3, 5, adds : "Who has not told us of the 
great cats of Africa, and the beauty of the antelopes (giraffes ?), j3ov- 
(BdXujv !■ dXkog, and the size of the ostriches ?" In Italy the people began 
to distinguish by this Greek word the ure-ox and wisent of the German 
forests, which have nothing in common with the nimble roe, Mart, 
Epigr. f 23. 4 : 

" Illi cessit atrox bicbalns atque bison." 

Pliny blames this as a misuse of names, remarking that the bubali 
are rather African animals, more like the calf and stag (8, 38 : " Quibus 
(uris) imperitum volgus bubalorum nomen inponit, aim id gignat 
Africa vituli potius cervique quadam similitudine"). This confound- 
ing of names, which probably arose from the similarity of the first part 
of the word to bos, bovis, was retained, in spite of Pliny, in the follow- 
ing century, as we learn from passages in later authors ; and when the 
buffalo appeared in Italy under the Longobards, it found the name 
ready made. The history of the word would in this way run a natural 
course, if the Slavic languages did not interfere and make us doubtful ; 
Slav, byvolii, Russ. buyvol, the ure-ox ; Pol. bawol, Bulgar. bivol, 
Magyar bival, Alban. bual, Greek j3ovj3a\og. " It is not to be doubted 
that these words belong together ; but it is difficult to decide whether 
and on whose part there was borrowing" (Miklosich). The Slavs, in 
the primitive time, must certainly have known and named both kinds 
of v/ild bulls in their native woods ; but when they moved into the 
Danube-lands, the ure-ox was very scarce there, and became more and 
more so in the course of the Middle Ages, not only there, but in 
the original home of the race. They forgot the old names, and after- 
wards adopted the Grseco-Latin ones, just as, among the Germans, the 
old word elck, elk, had quite disappeared, and has since been 
replaced by the Slavo-Lithuanian elen. The resemblance of sound 
to volii, bull, probably had an effect in the form of the word (see other 
names and compounds in Pott, E. F., ed. 2, II., 1, 808). We will add 
that those who may be inclined to understand the bubali of Paulus 
Draconius as meaning North European ure-oxen, because he also 
mentions equi silvatici, must put off the arrival of the buffalo in Italy 
till the time of the Arabs or the Crusades. Humboldt adopted the 
latter view : Kosmos, 2, 191 : " Of the Indian buffalo, which was not 



496 A'O TES. 



introduced into Europe till the time of the Crusades." Link makes 
the buffalo come in with the hordes of Attila. 



Note 87, page 362. 

For some years there has been published at Niirnberg an Allge- 
meine Hopfenzeitung, in 4 . Unfortunately we have never set eyes 
on this doubtless very interesting journal. It will surely contain a 
full explanation of the difficult questions treated in the text — as one 
cannot suppose that the editors notice only the most profitable fields 
of production, and the prices in the various markets, and have never 
inquired whence the herb that gives them employment and sustenance 
was originally derived, by whom it was named, and who first mixed it 
with beer. 

Note 88, page 367. 

The following little scene in the Metamorphoseb of Apuleius 
(towards the end of the 9th book) throws a light on the military 
system of the Roman Empire. A hortttlarius is walking home along 
the highway with his unladen ass. There meets him a stalwart 
soldier, miles e legione, and imperiously demands where he is taking 
the donkey to. The peasant, ignorant of Latin (for the scene is in a 
Greek country), answers nothing, but quietly goes on his way. Angry 
at his silence, the soldier applies the vitis which he carries in his hand, 
to the backs of the ass and its master. Then the peasant piteously 
excuses himself, that, not knowing the language, he had not under- 
stood what his honour had said. The soldier then says in Greek : 
" Where are you taking that ass to ? " The peasant replies, " To the 
next village." " But," answers the soldier, " I require the ass ; it must 
help to carry the baggage of our commandant, praesidis nosiri, to the 
fort." And he seizes the animal's bridle to lead it away. Prayers are 
of no avail ; on the contrary, the soldier turns his vitis round to break 
the peasant's skull with its thick, knobby end. Then it is related how 
the peasant takes courage from despair, thrashes the soldier, takes 
away his spatha, leaves him lying black and blue with blows, and flies 
to hide himself at the house of a friend in the village. But other 
soldiers have come to the help of their half-dead comrade, the magis- 
trates are roused, the criminal's hiding-place is discovered, and he 
thrown into the publicus career 'to await his execution. Our "New-Ger- 
man militarism," as it is called, does not come up to this by a long 
way yet. 



NOTES. 497 



Note 89, page 384. 

The name of Turkish wheat and the extensive propagation of maize, 
not only in the Levant, but in Eastern Asia and the interior of Africa, 
have often provoked the heretical assertion that this corn did not 
originally come from America, but was an old possession of the 
Eastern hemisphere. Fraas, in his Synopsis Flora class., brings 
forward all sorts of insufficient arguments in favour of it ; and the 
same view held by Bonafous is triumphantly refuted by Alph. de 
Candolle, in the Geographie Botanique, p. 943. At the beginning of 
the sixteenth century, Turkish only meant foreign, or come from over 
the sea ; at that time geographical ideas were too indefinite to distin- 
guish exactly the West from the East Indies, and both from the land 
of the Turks. To this day the English call a bird that undoubtedly 
came from America turkey-cock (as they call maize Indian-corn) ; to 
the Germans he is kalkutischer-cock, as if he had come from Kalekut, 
while the Turks calls him Egyptian-cock (Pott, Beitrage, 6, 323). 

Note 90, page 385. 

If it be true that holcus sorgum can be recognised in an ancient 
Egyptian painting (A. Thaer, Die Alt. Egyptische Landwirthschaft, 
p. 19, Berlin, 1881), and that grains of it have been found in the graves 
of mummies, this fruit must in the course of time have withdrawn 
from Egypt to the regions of the Upper Nile. For the Arabian 
physician, Abd-Allatif, of Bagdad, who was born in 1161, and whose 
description of Egypt has been published by S. de Sacy, says expressly, 
page 32, that neither of the two kinds of black millet existed in Egypt, 
except in the upper district of the Said, where the dochn was parti- 
cularly cultivated. And, what is still more striking, even Prosper 
Alpinus, towards the end of the sixteenth century, found there no 
other bread than that made of wheat : ibi enim nulla alia panis 
genera cognoscuntur quam ex tritico parata. It would also not have 
been necessary to resort to India in the time of Pliny, if sorgum was 
to be found in Egypt. But as the commerce of the Red Sea ports 
with India was far from being unimportant under the rule of the 
Romans, corn that came from Upper Egypt might be erroneously 
supposed to have been introduced through Egypt from India 

Note 91, page 390. 

O. Hartwig, in his beautiful " Pictures of Culture and History from 
Sicily," remarks, with reference to Arabian cultivation in Sicily, that 
produce must necessarily increase where new plants are introduced. 

32 



498 NOTES. 



If this were altogether true, it would be of the utmost importance to 
the general history of culture. But it is subject to many limitations. 
Immigrants may bring with them their favourite plants, which per- 
haps were the most profitable in their own country ; they continue 
traditionally the culture they were accustomed to. A certain culture 
may for the moment, at a favourable juncture, yield a profit ; then it 
is continued from sheer inertia, long after the circumstances have 
passed away that led to its introduction. Again, the laws regulating 
trade and commerce, the manner and scale of taxation, acts of govern- 
ment of all kinds, give directions to agriculture that are not always in 
harmony with the natural vocation of the soil. It will be seen that a 
separate calculation must be made in each particular case. 

Note 92, page 396. 

When Arthur Young travelled in France, shortly before the Revo- 
lution, the potato was a vegetable almost unknown in that country ; 
ninety-nine out of a hundred peasants, he says, would certainly have 
refused to taste one. 

Note 93, page 396. 

Moltke, in his letters from Turkey, shrewdly observes that the 
tobacco-pipe was the magic wand that changed the Turks from one 
of the most turbulent nations into one of the quietest. Violence done 
to nature is certainly the first rude form in which man emancipates 
himself from blind impulse ; and on that ground we may hail all the 
horrors and abominations that savage peoples commit against their 
own bodies as a movement towards freedom. Opium, tobacco, 
brandy, hemp, toad-stool, etc., break the wildness, but replace it by 
dulness. If Moltke's observation be correct, our social democrats 
will shortly become tame also, for they are seldom seen without a 
cigar-stump in their mouths. 



Note 94, page 399. 

Link, Urwelt, 1, 428, was also of opinion that the apple-tree of our 
gardens was not descended from the European wild apple. The 
name of the apple-tree is particularly interesting, because it is the same 
among the Celts, Germans, Lithuanians, and Slavs, and therefore 
tends to prove a closer connexion on the part of the extreme western 
branch, the Celtic, with the Germano-Slavic branch than with the 
Italian. O. Celtic dball {all is a derivative element), A. Saxon appel, 
O. Norse epli [afialdr, apple-tree), O. H. Germ, aphul, Lith. obolys. 



NOTES. 499 



abolis, and O. Pruss. woble, apple ; Lith. obelis, abelis, and O. 
Pruss. wobalne, apple-tree ; O. Slav, yabluko, abliiko, apple, and 
yablani, ablani, apple-tree. If the swarms of Indo-Germans that 
broke into Central Europe from the East, of whom the nations after- 
wards called Celtic formed the vanguard, found the tree existing 
in the newly conquered countries, and regaled their rude palate 
with its sour astringent fruit, they might easily adopt the name given 
it by the hunting and fishing nation which they first encountered on 
European soil — the Finns. Of course that name is only known to us 
in its latest form, and we do not know what changes it has gone 
through ; Esth. ubin, uvin, and in the other dialect aun, oun ; Livon. 
umars, Finnish omena, Magyar alma (same in Turkish). When the 
study of the Finnic idioms is so far advanced, that by comparing the 
different branches of the stock we shall have obtained fixed laws of 
sound, from which conclusions can be drawn as to the primitive form 
of a given word, then also it can be decided whether the resemblances 
in the above forms of names are only accidental or prove a real con- 
nexion. In Greek and Latin the apple has really no individual name, 
for the Greek /xaXov, Latin malum, meant large tree, fruit in general, 
and only gradually became confined to the apple ; and the same holds 
good of the Latin pomum ; malum has also the appearance of being 
borrowed from the Greek. 

The wild Pear-tree native to the southern peninsulas — the Arcadians 
are said to have fed on pears as well as acorns — was called dxpdg, 
axepdog ; the cultivated was '6yx vr l (already in Homer). Koyx v n (Hesy- 
chius), also amog, and the fruit clttiov. Comparing the last word with 
the Latin pirns, pirum, we see that an s had dropped out of the 
Greek word (just as log, I.e., F"io6g, poison, is virus in Latin), and the 
a is only the non-significant prefix that the Greek is so fond of, The 
Latin word passed over to the Celts and Germans, proving that the 
pear-tree did not originally grow in the home of either nation. But 
the Lithuanians and Slavs have a word of their own for the pear. 
Lith. krausze, O. Pruss. crausios, Slav, grusha, chrusa. As it is not 
to be supposed that the Slavs can have known and named a tree that 
did not exist in the milder abodes of the Celts and Germans, this' 
grusha must be a borrowed word— but whence ? probably from one of 
the Pontic or Caspian languages, for it surely cannot be connected 
with axpdg, dxpdSog. The Albanians have also their own word for the 
pear, darde. 

In modern Europe we look upon North France, and especially 
Normandy, as the true apple and pear country, which not only bears 
the most, but the finest fruit, and where cider {cidre, Ital. sidro, cidro, 
from sicera, aiictpa, itself an old Semitic word) takes the place of wine 



500 NOTES. 



as a common beverage. Farther south, though that is where they 
came from, these fruit-trees do not thrive so well — a phenomenon by- 
no means rare, but none the less remarkable. 

Note 95, page 402. 

The hunter, silent and shy ("7//z Felde schleich ich still und wild"), 
has still much of the beast of prey in him. But the breeding of animals 
is already full of humanity ; look at H. Biirkel's painting in the New 
Pinakothek, at Munich : A flock of sheep in the Roman camfiagna. 
The shepherd walks before, the flock follows j he carefully holds a 
new-born lamb in his arms, others lie in baskets slung across the 
horse's back ; their mothers run bleating on both sides. How human 
and idyllic ! 

Note 96, page 404. 

Besides complexion, the oculi truces, the torvitas luminum, are 
spoken of as marks of the Germanic and other barbarians of the North. 
It is culture that awakens the inner life, and first gives soul to the 
eye, which, in the inhabitants of woods and steppes, has still the 
peculiar wide-awake look of the hunted animal, or the keen glance of 
the bird-of-prey. Vambe'ry, Globus, 1870, p. 29, says of the Kurd: 
" It is especially the eyes, those ever-sparkling lights, meditating mis- 
chief or fraud, that you may know him by among hundreds of Asiatics. 
It is remarkable that both the Bedouin and the Turkoman may like- 
wise be distinguished by these signs from kindred races that lead a 
settled life. Is it the insuperable hatred of four walls, or the bound- 
less horizon, or a life in the open air, that conjures this glitter into the 
eyes of Nomads?" ' 



END OF THE NOTES. 



INDEX. 



Abbreviations. 

AS., Anglo-Saxon; conn., connected ; fr., from; G., German; OG., Old 
German ; ON., Old Norse; SI., Slavic; Ssk., Sanskrit. 



woble, abluko 



Abydon, 



yavor 



oced 



"Afiayva (rose) 
Aball, abolis, 

(apple) . 
Abantis, Amantia 

Amydon. 
Acacia : Jotham's "bramble, 

131 ; American acacia . 
Acarnanians : half-Hellenic 
Accipiter, acceptor (hawk) . 
Acer, acernus, ahorn, 

(maple) . 
Acetum (vinegar) : akeit 

G. ehiz, ezih . 
'Aypag. axtpSog (wild pear). 
Acnua, actus (120 ft.) . 
'Ada/ictf, adamant, diamond ; 

mas, almaz 
Aes, aiz, iarn, Ssk. ayas 
iEtolians : half- Hellenic 
Africae aves (guinea-fowl) . 
Agathyrsi : tattooed . 
Agave Americana (Indian fig) 
Ager : (1) arvus ; (2) arbustus 

(3) pascuus 
Agricultural terms unlike in Latin 

and Greek .... 
Agrios (wild) = shepherd 
Ahaks (pigeon) : conn, with caog 

kogas ? . 
Ahorn (maple) : fr. acernus 



el 



PAGE 

475-6 
498-9 

459 

394-5 

61 

486 

481- 

79 
499 
438 



478 

445 
61 

273 

33 

18, 395 

104 

438 

70 

485 
481 



Aiyi-Xojipi aiyi~7rvpoQ, aiyog koXo- 

Kvv9a 433 

Alpa (darnel), l^aipov/xai . . 433 
At£, aiyog (goat) : common to 

Aryans 462 

Akva (horse) : acva, equus, ech, 

eoh, 48 ; acpa. ... 45 
Alani : nomad Iranians, 27-8 ; 

rather fair .... 405 
'AXavvoi : fr. haloin (salt) ? . 410 

Alba, aube (surplice) . . 135 

Albanians: settled in Greece, 30; 

of Illyrian race . . . 62, 429 
Albizzia julibrissin : fr. Turkey . 393 
Albus (white), alpt, selfet, lebedi 

(swan) ..... 259 
Ale, alus, olii, 61 : fr. oleum . 124 
'AXetcTwp, — rpvwv (cock), gemma 

alectoria . . 243-4,271,482 

'AXsktujp, — rpvujv . . . 244 
'AXeKrpvaiva, — ropig (hen) . . 245 

Aleuads (grinders?) in Larissa . 65 
Alica (gruel) . . . 379, 438 
Allium (garlic) . . . .156 
Almond : came fr. W. Asia to 
Greece (d/j,vydd\r]) t 294 ; to 
Italy (nux graeca) . . . 296 
Aloe (agave Am.) : came fr. 
America, spread round Medi- 
terranean . . . .18, 395 



502 



INDEX. 



"A\<pi, &\<piTov (barley-meal), 431; 

unlike Latin .... 43§ 
Amalis, amuls, omela (mistletoe). 488 
'Apr], hama, ahm, ohm, awme . 456 
America : Old World products 
took new start in, 383 ; A. gave 
us turkey, maize, potato, Indian 

fig, &c 394-5" 6 

Ammazzo l'asino (oleander). . 310 
'A/jKpL-yvrieiQ (Hephaestus) . . 435 
'AfivySdXr] (almond) = Cybele ? 487-8 
Anas, vaaaa, antis, ond, hoet, 

Uv-ka (duck) . . . .277 
Andereigerra (weasel) . . 492 
'Avdpdx^v (arbutus) : fr. avQpal . 305 
'AvSpairodov (slave) : not Homeric 447 
Angles : "had no horses " . . 56 
Angourion, ogurets, agurke, gher- 
kin 239 

Anke, anc-smero (butter) . . 130 
Anser, hansa, x<*v, G. gans, gass, 

goose, gander, ged . . . 278 
Apfel-sine (sweet orange) . . 338 
Apile, avilys, uley (beehive) . 463 
"Attloq (pear): for cl-ttiooq =• pirus 499 
Apple : native to Europe, but not 
reclaimed here, 399 ; aball, 
abolis, yabluko, seppel, aphul 498-9 
Apricot : came fr. Central Asia 
(Armeniaca), 320 ; to Italy 
(praecoqua), 321 ; to Spain 
(al-barquq, albaricoque) . . 322 
Apvynys (hop-vine), — nei (hops) 450 
Aquicelos (pine-nuts in honey) . 224 
Arabs : as destroyers, 27-8 ; of 
old had no horses, 42-3 ; dis- 
couraged vine-growing, 79, 80 ; 
still half-nomadic, 109 ; drink 
butter, 129. Introd. pome- 
granate, 183 ; saffron, 200 ; 
safflow, 201; date-palm, 202-3, 
210-I ; papyrus, 233; lemon, 
336; orange, 337-8; carobs, 
342 ; millet, 385 ; silkworm, 
cotton, sugar-cane, &c, 389, 

390, 497-8 i 



PAGE 
487 



Aragh, orekhu, reszutas (nut) 

Arare, apoe.iv, arjan, arti, orati 

(toear); arvum, dpovpa (ear-th), 

64, 104 
Aratrum, dporpov, oralo, radio 

(plough) . . -43° 

Arbaiths, arbeit, rabota (labos ?) . 436 
Arbutus (strawberry-tree) . . 305 
Area (threshing-floor) . . . 438 

Argos 65 

Aries, eris (ram) . . . 433 

Aristseus invents oil . . . 95-6 
Armenia : rich in horses, 46 ; 

bred mules . . . .ill 
Armenians : an Iranian people, 
62, 426 ; drank beer through 
pipes . . . 121, 464-5 

Armeniaca, meliaca (apricot) . 322 
"Apveg (rams ; degenerate wheat) 433 
Arre, kharre (nut) = Kapva, apva, 

avapd ..... 487 
Artichoke : reclaimed in Europe. 399 
Aryans : condition on reaching 
Europe, 30-34 ; had a common 
word for horse, 48, for plough- 
ing (?), 64, 429, 430-1-8, for 
copper, 445 ; lived in wicker- 
houses, 114-116, or under- 
ground, 32, 41 1 -2; drank 
mead . . . . .126 
Ash : for spear-shafts . . 31 

Asia (rye) in the Alps . . 433 

Asia Minor : Iranian in N., 

Semitic in S.E. . . . 426 
Asilus, esel, asilas, osilu : fr. asi- 

nus, not asellus . . . 461 

Asinus, ovoq : fr. Heb. athon, &c. 460 
Ass : came fr. S.W. Asia to 

Greece, Italy, no, Gaul . in 

Assyrians : invented war-chariot 

43-4, 59 
'AcTepiag (Egyp. hawk), astur, 

austor, autour, yastreb . . 486 
Auca (goose): for avica . . 351 
Aurantium Olysiponense (sweet 

orange) 351 



INDEX. 



503 



PAGE 

Aurora, aurum : r for s , . 442 
Ausis, auksas (gold) : borr. while 

aurum was ausum . . . 442 

Auspicia ex avibus, ex tripudiis . 247 

Austi (weave), udis (web) . . 442 

Avars (Turkish) : ravaged Greece 29 

Awme : fr. a\it], hama . . 456 

A-zucena (lily) : Heb. susan . 476 

Badger : reached W. Europe 
about fall of Rome, 352 ; 
names .... 493-4 

Bad-ius, bajo, bai = spad-ix . 478 

Balg, (3aiov (palm-branch) : fr. 

ba, (3tjt 478 

Baking : a late art ; came from 

S. Europe . . . 435-6 

Balandis, balan, balon (pigeon) . 485 
Briavariov (pomegr. flower), 

balaustro, balustrade . . 474 
Balkh, Bactra .... 29 
Balsamine : came fr. India with 

Portuguese . . . . 393 
Bang, beng, banha, Banga . . 472 
Barca (a bark) : fr. tree- bark . 468 
Barley : icpiOr], hordeum, G. 

gerst ..... 62 
Barrel versus wine-skin, 82 ; 

names for . . 454-5-6 

Barsuk, borz (badger) . . 494 

Bast-ropes : esp. of lime . 467-8 

Bastarnse : mixed horse and foot 57 
Batavians : as riders ... 56 
Batnim, Gen. xliii. 11 : pistachios? 312 
Bean : early cultiv., 65, 440 ; 
Egyptian bean extinct in 
Egypt .... 232-3 

Beaver, beber, biber, fiber . . 31 
Beer : once common in Egypt 
(zythos), Spain (cerea), Thrace 
(bryton), Armenia, Illyria, Pan- 
nonia (sebaia, camum), 119- 
122; then among Celts (korma, 
cerevisia, brace), Germans, 
Lithuanians, Slavs, Finns, 
122-5; biere fr. bibere, 124; 



He and She-goat b., 359 ; addi- 
tions to b. before hops . 359, 360 
Beer-and-butter Europe, Wine- 

and-oil Europe 
Bees : only wild in Homer, 113 

kept on trees in E. Europe 
Bellerophontes, Melerpanta 
Bellula (weasel) . . . . . 
Beng, bang (intoxication) . 
Beo, O. Ir. : = viv-us . 
Bij3\ivog dlvag . 
Bibracte, Bibrax : fr. beaver 
Biere, G. bier, beer : fr. bibere 
Bignonia catalpa : fr. America 
Bi/eoc, (Sikiov, vicia, G. wicke, 

vetch 168 

Bill, G. beil : fr. Celtic biail 446-7 

Bird-breeding : characteristic of 

Latins, 277 ; declined in Mid. 

Ages 

Birinj, brinz (rice) 

Birschen (coursing) : fr. O. Fr. 

berser ..... 
Biset (stockdove) : fr. bis . 
Bi'ffra? (Pers. King ?) 
Black millet : came fr. India to 

Italy before Pliny, again with 

Arabs ; despised 
Blaireau (badger) : fr. bladarius 

(corndealer), biada, ble . 
Boek-weyt, bouquette, bucail 
Boyypoe, Margus, Morava . 
Boghu (God) : fr. Iranic 
Boisseau, bushel, boite, boiter 

fr. buxus 
Bolle (onion) : fr. cipolla . 
Boot, booth : fr. fiourig 
Bortnik. bartnik (bee-master) 
Both, bothan, bothie ; botte, 

bottle : fr. j3ovng . 
Bow/3a\tc, — Xoc. : not buffalo 
Bov-irXf]^ (axe?) 
Boussole, bruxula : fr. buxus 
Bov-06r) in Illyria = ox-run . 
Bovrig,(3v-iQ, butt, botte, bouteille; 

booth, bothie, &c. . ., . 456 



119 

463 
459 
492 
472 
, 407 
448-9 

3i 

, 124 

395 



280 
380 

282 

258 
489 



385 

494 

387 

459 

55 

179 

159 
456 
463 

456 
494-5 
447-8 

179 
50 



504 



INDEX. 



BovTvpov, butyrus, butter, 128; fr. 

Finn, woid ? . . . . 129 
Bows : of yew, 31, 407 ; horn . 408 
Box-tree : its value, 176 ; came 
fr. W. Central Asia, 176-7-8; 
things made of it named after 

it 179 

Bpa(3v\ov (sloe) . . 287-8 

Brace, braga (beer) . . 123-5 

Bradigalo (hops) . . . 360 

Bramble: "fire out of" . . 131 
Brandy : a curse . . .126 

Braydis, bredis, fiplvdog (elk, stag) 429 
Bread, G. br6t ( = leavened) ; a 

late invention . . 435-6-8 

Breilu, breila (rose) . . . 476 
Brewing, Old G. briuwan . .125 
Britons : fr. brit, breith (tattooed) 

33 ; had war-chariots . . 58 
BpiZa (rye) . . . 428, 434 

Bro, broo, broon (quern) . . 436 
Broch, brock (badger) . . 494 

Bpopog (oats), fiptJuoQ (goat-smell) 433 
Briinne, brunjo, SI. brunia (coat 

of mail) : fr. Celtic bni (belly) 447 
Bpvrov, bruwele (beer, brewer) 121-5 
Bubalus (buffalo), 355 ; /3ov(3a- 

\ig, — Xoe (antelope) . 494-5 

Biichse, box, &c. : fr. buxus . 179 
Buckwheat : came fr. Mongolia ; 
to N. Germany and France by 
sea (boekweyt, bouquette), to 
S. Germany by land (heiden- 
korn = Sl. poganka ?), 386-7-8 ; 
called Turk, Saracen, heathen, 
Tartar, Greek . . . 387 

Budini : comparatively fair . 404 

Buffalo : came fr. S. Asia to Hun- 
gary, Italy, S. France . 354-5 
Buklieza (weasel) . . . 492 
Bulgarians (Turkish) : ravaged 

Greece 29 

Bullace : fr. Celtic . . .288 
Bullock-cart . . . 50 

Burgundy (ancient) : made with 
resin and pitch ... 78 



PAr.E 

Buricus (ass, horse, mule) . . 462 
Busa (Armenian beer) . 461-5 

Buscione, buisson : fr. buxus . 1 79 
Butter : unknown in Greece, 127 ; 
churned by swinging, 127-8, 
465 ; used as ointment, 128, 
130 ; drunk by Arabs, &c, 129 ; 
used by Germans in pastry, 
129 ; preserved by salting, 130 ; 
fr. fiovTvpov, butyrus . . 377 
Buxus, 7cv%og (box-tree) . .176 
BvftXivog divog . . . 448-9 

Byblus (papyrus) : ship's tackle 

made of ... 134-6-7 

By/3Xoe : Phoen. gybl, Heb. gobel 

(hill), 448, 477 ; Byblian colonies 449 
Byvolvi, buyvol (ure-ox) ; bawol, 
bivol ((3ov(3a\og) . . • 495 

Cabbage : grew wild in Europe ; 

reclaimed here (?) . . . 399 
Cactus Opuntia (Indian fig) 18, 395 
Csecuban wine .... 82 
Cadia (beer) . . . 121 -5 

Calamine, giallamina, G. galmei : 

fr. Kadfieia . . . . 478 

Calamus (reed), calamajo, — mita, 

— mistro . . . . 228 

Caledonians : had small horses . 56 
Calix, G. kelch, chalice . . 377 
Calx, G. kalk (lime), chalk . 117 

Camel : reached Africa (after a.d. 

200) .... 203, 476 
Caminus (chimney): caminata, G. 

kemenate (warmed room), SI. 

komnata (room) . . 117 

Camisia, chemise : borr. fr. Gaul 144 
Camum (beer) . . , .122 
Canaan, Kenaan : Phoen. Xva, 

'°X™ 477 

Candetum ( 100 ft. ?) . . . 438 

Cane, canna, Kavvrj, Heb. kaneh : 

came fr. Asia to Greece, Italy, 

228-230 ; can, canister, knaster, 

canal, channel, canon, cannon 

229, 231 



INDEX. 



505 



Cannabis, chanvre ; hsenep, hanaf ; 

konopeli (hemp) . . 151 

Cannae . . 231 

Cappadocians : bred reproductive 

mules . . . . .111 
Capri-ficus (wild fig), capreolus 432-3 
Capus (falcon) : fr. capere . . 486 
Cap-ut, KEip-aXi], AS. heaf-od, 

heaf-ola, ON. hofruth . .156 
Caputium,kapusta, kabes, cabbage 377 
Carat : fr. Kfpdria (carob-beans) 341 
Carbasus, KapTraaog (fine flax) : fr. 

Ssk. karpasa (cotton) . . 142 
Cardo (N. and S. line) . . 73 
Carians : took ^Egean Isles, 66 ; 

cult, plane-tree, 220 ; reached 

Greece .... 426-7 

Carnation, pink : favourite of 

Italians .... 393 

Carob-tree: fr. Palestine (*« husks," 

Luke xv. 16 ; " St. John's 

bread"), 340-1 ; Arab, kharub 342 
Carrot : reclaimed in Europe . 399 
Caryota (nut-shaped date) . . 209 
Caseus, G. kase, cheese . . 377 
Caspar, Gaspar, Asper . . 240 
Castanea (chestnut) : whence the 

name? .... 295, 487 



Castration 

Cat, the domestic : in Egypt, 
346-7 ; came late to Europe, 
348-350 ; followed the rat ? 351 ; 
euphemistic names 

CdX-inus, kat-zTy, kettle, kotilii . 

Cattle introd. by Nomads 

Catus, Kcvna . . . 350-1 

Caulis, G. kohl ; caulis rapi, G. 
kohlrabi 

Cedro : citron, not cedar 

Celto-Iberians : mixed horse and ft. 

Celts : had war-chariots, 58 ; in 
N. Italy, 64 ; made hunting an 
art, 282 ; did smith-work for 
Germans, 446-7 ; nearer to 
Germano-Slavs than to Greco- 
Latins 



425 



493 
461 

356 
493 

399 
335 

57 



498-9 



PAGE 

Cepe, caepa, Katna (onion) . 156 

Cephalo, cefaglione : fr. encephalos 207 
Cepulla, cipolla, G. zwiebel, bolle 159 
Cerasus, ickpaffog, G. kirsche, SI. 
chereshnia (cherry), cornus, icpa- 
veia (cornel-cherry) : fr. cornu, 
Kspag (horn), not fr. Kepaaovg, 
— ovvrog .... 302 

Cerea, cerevisia (beer) . 121 -3 

Ceva (cow) .... 429 

Chalk : fr. calx (lime) . .117 

Chao de Bux .... 177 
Xapa% (vine-pole) . . . 45 1 
Chechevitsa, Russ. (lentil) : fr. 

cicer .... 166-7 

Cheese, G. kase, fr. caseus . 377 

X«w, xvfir\v, Koyytikio, fundo (pour) 422-3 
Cherry : fr. Asia Minor, 300 ; the 
sour juicy grafted on the sweet, 
301 ; origin of names cerasus, 
visciola . . . 302-3 

Cherry-bay : fr. Trebizond . 393 

Chervil, G. kerbel : fr. caerifo- 

lium, cerfeuil . . . 377 

Chestnut : came fr. Asia Minor to 
Greece, 294-5, I ta b r > Spain, S. 
France, 296-7 ; abundance no 
proof of being native . 297-8 

Chick-peas : fr. cicer, by folk- 
etymology . . . 167-8 
Xi\ioi = Ssk. sahasra, Zend, haz- 

anra(?) . . . .423 

China-grass, 150 ; beats cotton 469 
Xitmv, kiOwv (tunic) : fr, Phcen. 

kitonet (linen) . 66, 133-4, !39 

Xva, 'O^va, Canaan . . . 477 
Xovdpog (gruel), 379 ; unlike Latin 438 
Chorasmians : equestrian nomads 47 
Xpvaog (gold) : Heb. and Phoen. 

khariis . . . 443 

Churning . . . . 127-8, 465 
Cicer, cece, chiche, G. kicher, 

chick-pea . . 166-7 

Ciconians in Thrace : mixed horse 
and foot (?), 58 ; gave Ulysses 
wine . . . 71-2, 447 



5°6 



INDEX. 



Cider, 123; cidre, sidro, fr. sicera 

Heb. shakar (to be tipsy) . 499 

Cipolla, ciboule, zwiebel, bolle 157,377 
Citron : unknown bef. Alexander, 
331-2 ; slowly naturalized in 
Italy . . . . 334-5-6 

Citrus : prop, ddpog, cedar (citrosa 
vestis) ; then citron-tree, and so 
malum citreum (citron) and kit- 
peai .... 333-4 

Cive, civette, chives : fr. caepa . 160 
Claie, cleta, cliath, cluit (wattle) 1 17 
Claret: vinum claratum, moratum 81 
Cock : unknown in Europe and 
W. Asia till Pers. conquests, 
241-2 ; name dXtKTwp conn, 
with fire-worship, 244-5 > m ' 
ferences fr. names — kana, hana, 
henna ; kogut,kukko,coq, chick ; 
kur, kura, &c. . 248-9, 482-3-4 

Coileach, chelioc (cock), caloca- 

tanos (wild poppy) . . 483 

Colophonium (violin resin) . -317 
Columba (pigeon) : fr. Ko\vfi(3og 
(diver, waterfowl, white fowl?) 
259 ; hence colum, koulm, 
golubi .... 261, 485 
Comadreja (weasel) . . . 6*"> 
Complexion : dark absorbs fair 40J 5-6 
Coniglio, cony, G. kaninchen, 

kuniglein : fr. cuniculus . 343 

Copper : known to Aryans (ayas, 

aes, aiz, iarn) . . . 445 

Coq (cock),coquelicot (wild poppy) 483 
Coral-tree .... 394 

Coriander : Heb. gad, Afr. goid 163 
Cork stoppers .... 457 
Cortex (bark), corcha, cork . 457 

Corylus for cosilus, cosl, hazel = 

Kaaravov? . . . 295,487 
Costa (rib), kosti,- oarsov (bone) 240 
Cotognata, cotignac (quince-jelly) 186 
Cotonea mala (quinces) . 186, 333 
Cotton: versus linen, 148-9, 150; 
introduced by Arabs to Italy 
(cotone) 390 



PAGE 

Coxa (hucklebone), cos, coes . 435 
Crisuommolo (apricot) : fr. xpvsb- 

ftr\\ov ..... 322 
Crocus : see Saffron. 
Cromlech . . . . .116 
Crown-imperial : fr. Persia . 392 

Cucumber : in Egypt . . 234-5-6 
Cucurbita, courge, G. kiirbiss 

(gourd, pumpkin) . . 238, 240 
Cudon, ys-guthan, eiad-cholum, 

keutaris (ringdove) . . . 4S5 
Culmus, halm (any stalk) . . 430 
Culture : exhaustion of soil by, 
not irremediable, 19-26; causes 
of decline in East, 26-30 ; effects 
of, on plants and animals, 400, 
402-3 ; on man . . 400-403 

Cuminum, G. chumil, kiimmel . 461 
Cummin, Heb. kammon : fr. SW. 

Asia, 162; black c, git, gith . 163 
Cuniculus (rabbit, mine) . . 343 
Cupa, kv-wi], G. kufe (cask) ; coppa, 
cup ; cupola, G. kopf ; cuparius, 
cooper .... 455-6 

Currants .... 80-1 

Cydonian apple (quince) . 185, 333 

Cypress, 18, 20 ; came fr. Afghan- 
istan to Palestine, Cyprus, 212, 
478-9, Crete, Greece, 213-4- 
5, Italy, 215-6; its symbolism, 
212-6, 479, 480 ; use in ship- 
building, statuary, joinery . 213-5 
Cyprus : named from cypress . 478 
Cytisus (tree-clover) : fr. East ; 

good for cattle, made milk 306-7-8 
Cytorus Mts. : grew boxwood, 177, 474 

Dachs, taxus, tasso (badger) : fr. 

dehsen ..... 493 
Dacians : tattooed, 33 ; akin to 

Thracians and Getse . 62, 428 
Daktylos, datil, dattero, G. dattel 

Fr. datte (date) . . . 209 
Dahse : equestrian nomads . . 47 
Damascene, damson, G. zwet 

sche (?) . 



INDEX. 



507 



Aatpvri fr. H$w, as laurus fr. lavo, 472-3 
Darde (pear) .... 499 
Dariben (terebinth) : native to 

Kurdistan .... 489 
Date-palm, 18 ; came fr. Baby 
Ionia to Arabia, Palestine, 203, 
Greece (as symbol of Apollo, 
&c), 204-5-6, Italy, 206-7-8, 
210-I, Spain, 210-1 ; training 
of white palm. . . . 210 
Daube, douve (stave of cask) : fr. 
doga, do X rj . . . 454-5 



473 

493 

32 
385 
3ii 

249 

388 

429 

61 



Aavxva, davxvog (laurel) . 
Dehsen (turn, swingle), deichsel, 

thisl (thill of waggon) 
Deus (god) ; Lith. devas, Finn, 
taivas (sky) .... 
Dhorra (black millet) 
Difna, defle, Arab, (oleander) 
Dik (cock), tik, tyuk (hen), Mong. 
takia ..... 
Dikusha (buckwheat) 
Di-mallum = two-peaked 
Dod5na in Epirus, 60; inThessaly 
Doga, dauge (stave), SI. duga 

(bow) : fr. coxh . • 454*5 

Dokhn (black millet) . 385, 497 

Dolmen . . . . .116 
Domiciliation : promoted by tree- 
culture .... 102-109 
Donnola (weasel) 
Dorian migration, the last . 
Dove, the wild, 253-4-5 : deaf, 
dubo, taube, fr. dark hue ; so 
wkX-eta, pal-umba, siz-iak, bis- 
et, &c, 258; half-tamed 
Dubh (black) : R. Dubis, Doubs 
Duck : native to Europe 
Dulbend (turban), tulipano, tulip 
Dwarf-palm .... 
Dyn, dynat, danad, linad, lenad 
(nettle) . 428 



492 
61 



260 
258 
277 
391 
206 



Ear, ear-th 

Eas, for veas? (weasel) 

Eburones : fr. ibhar (bow) ? 



470 

64, 104 
492 
407 



Echalas (vine-pole) : fr. X"P a £ ? 45 1 
Echalotte, shalot, scallion . . 154 
Eglus, oglus (yew) . . . 408 
E/'j0£<rtan'7j = virga Janata . . 95-7 
'E\aia (olive-tree) ... - 91-2 

Elch (elk) : replaced by SI. elen 495 
Elder : for spear-shafts . . 31 
'HXsKThjp (sun, fire), fjXeitTpov 

(amber) .... 244 

'HXtK-jOa, 'RXeicTpviov . . 244 

"E\<pog (butter) . . . .128 

Emalas, emelmo (mistletoe) . 488 

*Efi-(pvrog, inpotus (graft) ; tp.<pv- 
tevoj, impiton, impfen, Fr. enter 
(imp, graff ) . . . .327 
Eneti, Heneti, Veneti . . 63 

England : future of . .24 

Ephyra (watch-tower) : towns so 

called . . . . . 65 
Epopeus : his oil -fountain . -95 
Erba spagna (lucerne) . . 306 

Erbse, arawiz, tpzfitvQog (pea) 167, 377 
'Epiveog okvvQog (wild fig) . . 459 

Ermine, hermelin : fr. harm . 492 
Ervum, earfe, opoflog (pea) . 167 

Esparto (Span, broom) : in Punic 

Wars .... 134, 151 
Ests, Esthonians : drank mead 

and mare's milk . . 55 

Etruscans : in N. Italy . 63, 74 
Eucalyptus globulus : fr. Australia 395 
Euonymus (spindle-tree) . . 310 
Europe: half Wine-and-oil, half 

Beer-and-butter . . .119 
European wild plants reclaimed, 
very few : perhaps cabbage, ar- 
tichoke, turnip, carrot : not 

apple 399 

Exhaustion of soil by culture : 
not irremediable . . 19-26 

Faba (bean) : bobvi ; babo, pupa ; 

papu, ubba ; ffa, seib . . 440 
Fahs (hair), Trticog (fleece), vkoKog 

(bast) .... 47o-2 

Fairy (weasel) .... 492 



5 o8 



INDEX. 



286 
438 



17 a 

bele 
bilch 



Falco (falcon), falx (sickle) 486 ; 

Cf. upTTf]. 

Falconet (gun) : prop, little fal- 
con 

Far, farina, farrago . 
Fauna : subject to change 

passim. 
Felis (wild cat) 348-9 ; 
(marten), belette (weasel) 
(rellmouse) .... 
Felt, G. filz, SI. polsti 
Fennel .... 
Fern, G. farn, 484 ; see Pari-ti. 
Ferret, furetto : brought fr. Africa 
to Spain (to hunt the rabbit ?) 
Ficus, ovkov : fr. nfitzov 

duplex ; bifera ; Carica, 

Caunea (Smyrna) . 

Ruminalis . . 87 

Fieno d'Ungheria (lucerne) 
Fig-tree : native to Syria, 85 ; 
came to Greece after Hesiod, 
85-6, to Italy, 86-7; varieties, 
87. 457-8; type of higher life, 
86, 
Fimmel, maschel (hemp) 
Finns : in Europe bef. Aryans . 
Fir-tree : pinus picea, IXcitt] 
Flagellum, G. flegel, flail . 
Flagon, flask : fr. vasculum 
Flahs (flax), plaukas (hair), plau- 

szas (bast) . . . 470-2 

Flax : seed used bef. fibre (?) 
132-3 ; cultiv. in Egypt, 133, 
Palestine, Colchis, &c, 134; 
less in Greece, 139, more in 
N. Italy, Spain, Gaul . 140- 2-3 
Flora : subject to change 17 et passim. 
Flowers : first trained in Asia . 187 
Focaccia (cake) : fr. focus (hearth) 436 
Fceniculum, G. fenchel, fennel . 377 
Forests : destruction of . 19, 20-1 
Formento, froment (wheat) . 433 

Fruit-culture . . . 323-328 
Fufluns (Bacchus) =(3v(3\tvoQ? . 449 
Fyrs, furze .- akin to irvpoc (wheat) 431 



492 

3i 

235-6 



476 
456 

87 
458 
306 



131 
51-2 

34 
223 

377 
456 



Gadhva (cat ? dog ?) . . 492 

Gaggia di Co>tantinopoli . . 393 

Gaidys (cock), gasli (psaltery) . 483 

Taia-aroL (spearmen) . . 447 

TaXki] (weasel) .... 348 

TapTTjacria (ferret) . . 344 

Galgo : fr. canis Gallicus . . 282 

Galica, galka (daw) . . . 482 

Galla (gall nut) : for gac-la = kt/k-iq 482 
Gallinaria silva . . . .452 

Gallus (cock): for gac-lus = Kaica 482 

Gar, ger, geir (spear) : fr. Celtic 447 

Garduna (weasel) . . . 492 

Garlic, gar-leac, geir-laukr . 160 

Garofolo, — fano (pink, gilliflower) 393 

Garrio, yrjpvw, gla-gola-ti . . 482 
Gauls : mixed horse and foot, 57 ; 

made hunting an art . . 282 
Gautar, Gotar (Scand. Goths) : fr. 

gjota (pour) . . . 422-3 

Geloni : tattooed 33 

Gelso (mulberry) : fr. morus celsa 293 
German terms of building borr. 
fr. Latin, 117 ; of gardening 

and farming .... 377 
Gertis (cock), gerto (hen), ger- 

toanax (hawk) . . . 484 

Gesmino, gelsomino, jessamine . 390 
Getse: akin to Thracians 62, 428 ; 

turned teetotalers . . . 454 

Yfireiov, yrjOvWig (leek) . . 157 

Giglio, lirio (lily) : for lilio . 476 

Girna (millstone), girnos (quern) . 436 
Git, gith (black cummin) . .163 
Giutan, gjota (pour) . . 422-3 

Glass bottles : modern . . 456 

Glocio, kXcjZ'o (cluck) . . . 484 
Glukhti (deaf) : glukhari, gluszec, 
hlukhan (heathcock), 485 ; cf. 
Kurtinys. 
Goat : enemy to young trees, 23 ; 
in Greece and Italy, 112-3; has 

a common Aryan name . . 462 
Goat's, sheep's = wild, unfruitful 432-3 

Gobel, Gybl (hill), Byblos . 448, 477 

Goid (coriander) . . 163 



INDEX. 



509 



Gold: two names, (1) aurum, 
ausis, owr, &c. ; (2) gulth, 
zoloto, selts {xpvaog ? ) . 442-3 

"Golden apples" : not orange or 

lemon .... 185, 331 
Vo/xapi (ass) : fr. yopoq (load) . 461 
Goose : native to Europe, 277 ; 
easy to tame, 278 ; its down, 
quills ..... 279 
Gopher, Kwrrap-icroog, cupr-essus . 214 
Goths : ravaged Greece, 29, 30 ; 

named from giutan (pour) 422-3 

Graeci, TpaiKoi ( = old ?) . . 426 
Grsecum, creque, G. krieche (sloe) 288 
Grafting : carried to excess, 325-6; 

but beneficial . . . 326 

Grajo (gray, badger) : fr. agrario? 494 
Granada : fr. malum granatum . 183 
Gravling, greving (badger) . . 494 
Grecha, grechikha, gryka, griicken 

(buckwheat) . . . 387-8 

Greeks : enter Greece, 601 ; be- 
come farmers, 64-5; influenced 
by Phoenicians . . . 66-7 

Grefie, graff .... 327 
Griotte, agriotta (wild cherry) . 488 
Grusha, khrusha = dxpdg ? (pear) 499 
Guinea-fowl : came fr. Africa to 
Greece and Italy, 271-2-3 ; 
see Meleagris 
Gul (rose) : fr. vareda . -475 

Gurke, gherkin .... 239 
Gutans, Gut6s (Germ. Goths) : fr. 

giutan (pour) . . . 422 3 

Guth, God : Iranic . . . 464 
Gwiniz (wheat) : fr. gwenn, 

cvind (white) .... 431 
Tvqg (plough), ywde (bent) yvla 

(knees, joints) . . . 435 

Tvttt), yvTrupiov, zupa, zhupishte 

(cave) . . . . 41 1 -2 

Gyro-falco, ger-falcon, G. geier . 486 
rvpog, yvpog, ^vptvu) (round, go 
round) ; girna, zhernov, quair- 
nus (millstone) ; yvpig (meal) ; 
Tvpai irkrpai .... 436 I 



HiENEP,hanpr, hanaf :{r.icdvvaf3ig 151 
Haetumafit, Etymander, Helmand 478 
Hahan, .hahhila, haken, hacke, 

hachse, hough . . . 435 

Haida, haidina (millet) : fr. heiden- 

korn 387 

A'tfiaaia (fence) : of thorn, stone, 

or both ..... 106 
Half-Hellenes . . . .61 
Halka, alka (cock) = dXsicTOjp ? 242-4 
Halle (salt-pit), Halys, &c. 410-1 

Hammer : OG. hamar (stone) . 445 
Hamster : reached W. Europe 

about fall of Rome, 352 ; SI. 

khomiak, khomestaru . . 494 
Hana (cock), hanjd (hen), h6n 

(chick), 248 ; cano, Kavayri . 482 
Hangan, henge, henkel . . 435 
A7ra\oc, d/*a\6c (mollis) . . 459 
Harinc, herring = shoal-fish . 411 

"Ap-rrj (sickle) 438; (falcon) . 486 

Hart, harcelle (withe, osier-band) 467 
Haru, haraw (flax), kerp (hemp) 

= kropiva (nettle) . . . 470 

Hashish 151 

Hawk . . . .283, 486. 
Hawking : in Gaul, 282; Thrace, 

283 ; India, 284 ; firearms named 

from ..... 286 
'ByrjTrjpia (leading, guiding) : lump 

of figs at Plynteria . . .86- 
Heidenkorn (buckwheat) . . 387 
Helico: brings smith-work from 

Italy to Gaul .... 446 
Hellenes, Graikoi . . .60 
Helvennaca (kind of grape) . 78. 

'Kfii-ovog (mule) . . .112, 461 

Hemp : seed used before fibre (?), 

132 ; came from Turkestan to 

Thrace, woven into clothes, 

exported to Greece, 151 ; its oil 

eaten 152: 

Hen, henna, hanj6 : fr. hana 

(cock) 248. 

Heneti : (1) of Italy ( = Veneti), 

63 ; (2) of Asia, bred mules, III, 461 



5io 



INDEX. 



PAGE 

Heth, huth (pour) . . .422 
'Iepoc (sacred), upaZ, (falcon) : 

saker-falcon, G. weihe . . 4S6 
Hinn (Egyptian measure) . . 466 
Hinnus, 'ivvog, Ivvog, y ivvog (mule) 462 
Hippobotos in Armenia . .46 
Hippotades (horseman's son) = 

^Eolus 49 ! 

Hirquitallus,— llio : fr. hircus 

(goat) 433 ! 

History : second period . . 394 
Hlaibs, hlaifs (bread) : from 

KXifSavov, 435 ; ost-hleifr . 436 j 

Hleithra (tent), kletis (barn) . 1 16 | 
Hoha, huohili (hook, plough) . 435 j 
"OXjuoc, virepog (mortar, pestle) : 
unlike Latin .... 43 s 

Honey 126 

Hoppe, hub-alus, houblon, l'up- 
polo, lupulus ; hum-elo, xov/ut\i, 
khmeli, komlo (hops) 359, 360-1 
Hops : unknown to ancients, 358 ; 
first mention of, in France, Ger- 
many, England, 359 ; in Russia 
a symbol of joy . . 361-2 

Horn : made into bows . . 408 
Hornung (February) . . . 302 
Horse : known to Aryans, but 
whether used by them, 34-60 ; 
native in Mongolia, 35-6 ; came 
to Turkestan 36, Egypt 40, 
Syria 41, Arabia 42-3, Assyria 
43-4, Media, &c, 45-48; its 
Aryan name akva, 48 ; its use 
in religion 48-9, among Per- 
sians, Greeks, 53-4-5 ; Slavs, 
Lithuanians, Germans, Celts, 
55-6; horse and foot combined, 
57-8 ; three ancient types of, 
424 ; castration, shoeing 425-6 

Horse-chestnut : came from Tur- 
key ... 298-9, 393 
Hruk, hrukjan (crowing) . . 482 
Hubalus, houblon (hops) . . 360 
Human sacrifices . 32, 414-420 
.Humboldt on Migrations . . 34 



I'AGE 

Humelo, undo, fumlo (hops) . 359 

Humulus, humala, humall (hops) 361 
Humus, x"/* "' zemT, zemlia, 

Semele ? 448 

Humus-soil created by Indian fig 395 

Huns : as destroyers, 28 ; horsemen 60 
Hus, house, khizha = curia? perh. 

Iranic ..... 464 

Hvaiteis, wheat: fr. white . . 431 

Hyacinth : fr. Bagdad . . . 392 
Hyes (Bacchus), Hyades (his 

nurses) = Sabos, SavadEe . . 448 

Hyksos, shepherd kings of Egypt 40 

'Y<paivu>, weave .... 441 

Hyrcanians : horsemen . . 45 

Iar, yar (hen) .... 484 
lam for iz-arn = aes (copper) . 445 
Ibe, eibe (yew) .... 407 
Iberians : in Europe bef. Aryans, 
34; mixed horse and foot, 57 ; 
perh. built dolmens, 116; made 
beer, 120 ; hunted rabbit with 
ferret . . . 343"4> 4§9 

Ibhar, yubar (yew, bow) . . 407 
Illyrians : important link, 62-3 ; 

made beer, 121, mead . .126 
Indian corn, 497 ; see Maize. 
Indian fig (Opuntian cactus) : fr. 
America ; makes humus round 
Mediterranean . . .18, 395 
Insects, noxious : in barbarous 

lands ..... 412 
Intrisgan, intrusgjan (graft) . . 327 
Ionians, Id ovsg (= young ?) . . 426 
Ir, yr (yew, bow) . . . 407 
Iran and Turan . . .27, 46-8 
Iranians : as destroyers, 27 ; horse- 
men, 42, 44-48 ; influenced 
Slavs, prob. Germans . . 464 
Iron, eisen, eisarn : fr. Celtic . 446 
Irrigation : remedy for exhaustion 25-6 
Ismaros : wine of . .70-1, 447 
Italians : enter Italy, 63 ; become 
farmers, 64-5 ; influenced by 
Phoenicians .... 66-7 



INDEX. 



5i 



Italy : first Aryan settlers in, 63 ; 
how changed into a " fruit- 
garden, "323 ; employed Asiatics 
to transplant . . . .324 

Irea for Firka, vltex, withy, weide : 
fr. vieo (twine) . . . 449 

Iva, iga, iwa, ivin (yew) . . 407 

Japanese medlar : in S. Italy . 395 
Japygians : of Illyrian race . . 63 
Jaxartes : an Iranian word . . 47 
Jazyges : nomad Iranians . . 27 
Jotham's parable . . 130- 1 
Jove's acorn : (1) Ju-glans, wal- 
nut ; (2) Aioc fiaXavog, chestnut 294 
Jute ... . 150 

Ka, kau (ox) ; Ka^Xa (ox-eye) . 429 
Kabyles : not nomadic . .109 
~Ka8peia, calamine, G. galmei . 478 
Kahrka (fowl), icepicog (cock), 

kyark, cere (hen) . . . 249 
Kalmuk-Turgut migration . . 34 
KafiaZ, (vine-pole) . . .451 
Xana (cock), icavaxh, rji-Kctvog 248, 482-3 
Karbysh (hamster) . . . 494 
Karde (teasle) : fr. carduus (thistle) 377 
Kardelus, — lis (rope of bast or 

osier) .... 466-7 

Kartoffel (potato) : fr. tartufo 

bianco ..... 395 
Kasha (buckwheat gruel) . . 388 
Katils, kotllu, kettle : fr. catinus 461 
Keekers, licutkekers (peas, lentils) 167 
Kdpuj (shear, shave) . . 409, 410 
Kelyn, klen, icXivo-Tpoxog, yXelvog, 

hlinr, lin-boum, lehne (white 

maple) . . . . . 481 
Kemenate (warmed room) : fr. 

caminata. . . . 117 

Kendees (cock) : fr. canto ? . 483 

Ktpafxog (pottery), Kepafxelg . 441 
Kepdna (carob pods) ; cerates 

(carats) 341 

Xharus, xpver-oc (gold) . . 443 



Khlebii, klepas, klaips (bread) : 

fr. hlaifs . . . . . 435 
Khmeli, SI. (hops) . . 361-2 

Khomiak, khomestaru (hamster) 494 
Kirghizes : as horsemen . . 36-7 
K/p/coc, chark, krechet (falcon) . 487 
KiOwv, yirwy (tunic) : fr. Phcen. 

kitonet (linen) . . . 66, 133-9 
Kiti (Egyp. measure) . . . 466 
Kjonne, den kj. (weasel) . . 492 
Kleti, kletis (shed, barn) . .116 
KXiftavog, icplfi. (earthen oven), 

K\i(3avov (cake) . . 435-6 

KXivorpoxog (white maple) . . 48 1 
Knoblauch (garlic) : for kloblauch 160 
Kox^vrj, k6kkv% (os sacrum) . • 435 
KoK/c6-/Z7j\a; KOKKvyog fiijXa (apri- 
cots) : fr. prse-coqua . .321 
KoKKvysa (periwig-tree) . .318 
KoKKV-fxrjXov (plum) . . . 287 
Kokotu, kogut, kohut (cock), 

kokoshi (hen) . . . 24S, 483 
Kolokyntha (pumpkin) . . 236 
KoXovaog : for KoXoiciog . . 236 
Ko/xapog (arbutus) . . . 305 
Komnata, SI. (room) : fr. caminata 

(chimneyed) . . , . 117 
Konks, kook (hook) . . . 435 
Kovv^t] in beer . . 12 1, 360, 449 
Korma, kourmi (beer). . .123 
Konvog (wild olive) : cotinus 308, 474 
Kralikkas, krolik (rabbit) . . 491 
Kpa.vs.ia, cornus : fr. Kspag, cornu 302-3 
Krausze, khrusha = dxpdc? (pear) 499 
KpsKu) (weave), icepicig (shuttle), 
KpoKrj (woof), SI. krosno : unlike 

Latin 442 

KpLvov (fire-lily) . . . 189, 475 
Kpopivov (onion), creamh, ker- 
musze, cheremsha, hramsa, ram-- 
son, buck-rams (wild garlic) . 156 
Kropiva (nettle) : sails made of . 469 
Kuban, Hypanis .... 240 
Kuk, kukko, cocc, coq, gockel- 
hahn; kyklingr, kiichlein, cycen; 
kokkv%(i) .... 249, 483 



5 I2 



INDEX. 



Kukuruz (maize). . . . 385 

Kurluk (buckwheat) . ■ . . 388 

Kurtinys (deaf; heathcock). . 485 
Kuru, kura (cock, hen), churu, 

churuh, churus . . . 248 

Kwetys, gaidys (wheat) . . 431 
ICvafiog, irvapoq = haba, faba 

(bean) . . . . 440 
KvSiovia firjXa, cot5nea, coing, 

cognasse, quince . .185, 333 
KvTrdp-KToog, cupr-essus, Heb. 

gopher 214 

Kvtlvoq (pomegranate) . . 474 

KvTiopog : kotivoq (box ?) . . 474 

L for D : linad, Xacpvt], laurus 470-3 
L final in Germ, for N . . 461 
LM for DM, TM : Palmyra, Pal- 

mosa, Helmand, &c. . 477-8 

Labos, rabota, arbeit . . 436 

Lactuca, G. lattich, lettuce . 377 

Lagena, G. lagel (pot) . .461 
Lake-dwellings : later than sup- 
posed .... 443-446 
Laleh, lily .... 475 

Land used in three ways : pasture, 

ploughing, planting . . 104 

Land-measures unlike in Greece 

and Italy .... 438 

Ad<pvt) (<Sd0j//7)=lav-rus . . 473 
Lapin (rabbit) : fr. clapin (stooper) 345 
Larissa (fat-soiled) : towns so called 65 
Laserpitium (a spice) . . .153 
Lastka, lastochka (weasel, swal- 
low) . 492 
Latins ..... 63 
Latona, Ajjrw . , . 93, 157 
Laurel : followed Apollo-worship 
fr. W. Asia to Greece, 169, 
171-174; to Italy, 172-3; its 
geographical limits. . .175 
Laurix, lorichi (rabbit) 344-5, 491 
Laurus insana .... 

, Laurentum, Lavinium : fr. 

lavo .... 
tinus .... 



74 



472-3 
173 



Lavender, laundry : fr. lavo, lavan- 

dula 377 

Lazzeruolo (azerolia-tree) . . 390 
Aeftrjpig (rabbit) : Xe7rojoi'c=lepus? 491 

(skin) : fr. \e7tw (peel) . 491 

Leek, onion : loved or loathed, 
153-5-7, 160-1 ; magic powers, 
158, 160; leac, lauks, liikii, lus, 
llysian, 159; the cloven is klob- 
lauch, gar-leac, chesnokj the 
single, unio, oignon . .160 

Leithus (strong drink) . .125 

Leleges : pre-Hellenic . 61, 426-7 
Lemon : came with Arabs (limun) 336 
Lentil : fr. Egypt (0aKoc, Pha- 
cussa), or Palestine (adashim), 
165-6 ; European names fr. 
lens, exc. Slavic fr. cicer (chick- 
pea) .... 166-7 
Asttu) (peel), \£7rroc (tender) 468, 491 
AevKaia, \evic6-\ivov (esparto) 134, 151 
Leute, liudii (people) : fr. liudan 

(to bud) .... 421 

Liber, louft (bast) ; \£7ru>, lup-ti 

(peel) ; lipa, lepa (linden) . 468 

Liber, Libera .... 74-5 
Libum (cake) : for cllbum, K\i(3a- 

vov .... 43S- 6 - 

Libyans : in SW. Europe ? . 34 

Licium (woof), 442 ; lyko, lunkas 

(bast) 46S 

Liebstockel (lovage) : fr. libisticum 477 
Liege (cork) : fr. levis . -457 

Ligurians, Ligyans . . 63, 344 
Lilac : fr. Turkey . . . 392 
Lilium, \sipiov, lirio (white lily) : 

fr. laleh . . . . 189, 475 
Lily : unknown to Homer, 187 ; 
came fr. Central Asia to Greece, 
189, Italy, 191 ; as symbol . 193 
Lime-bast: plaited . . .31 
Limes decumanus (E. andW. line) 73 
Linad, lenad, linhaden (nettle) = 

dyn, dynat .... 470 
Linboum, lehne (white maple) . 481 
Lind, linn, lionn, leann, llyn (beer) 125 



INDEX. 



513 



Lind (lithe, bast), linde (linden), 

lindi (sash) .... 468 
Linen : woven in Egypt, 133, 
Palestine, Babylonia, Colchis 
(sardonicon), 134, 466 ; white 
worn by priests, 135 ; 1. sails, 
nets, armour, 135-138, 140-1; 
worn by Ionians, Athenians, 
138-9; woven in N. Italy, Spain, 
Gaul, Germany, 143 ; Germans 
love it, 146-7 ; used as money, 
148; 1. versus cotton, 148-9, 
150 ; rag-paper invented, 149; 
1. found in Lake-dwellings . 470 I 
Aivov, linum, 136-139 ; name 

spread over Europe, 143 ; = dyn ? 470 
Aivo-OwpaS, (linen-corsleted) . 137 

Linse, G. (lentil) : fr. lens . . 377 
Lint : used by Greeks . . 149 

Linteata legio .... 141 
Linteum (bast, linen) . 468, 470 

Linteus liber . . . 139, 140 
Lipa, lepa (lime-tree) . . . 468 
Lira, ge-leise (rut), de-liro 

(swerve) . . . 430-8 

Lithuanian, Letuvis : fr. leti (pour) 423 

s : bred horses . . 55 

Airi, XIra (linen cloth) : for Xivn, 

Xivra ..... 468 
Loaf, G. leib : fr. Kkifiavov, 
(c)libum, hlaifs, 435 ; 1. of sugar, 
salt, cheese .... 436 
Locrians : pre-Hellenic, 61 ; re- 
tained linen armour, 137-8; 
oath of . . . .156, 472 
Lombardy poplar : fr. America 

thro' Italy .... 394 
Loom : how old ... 67 

Loshak, ishak (mule) . . 462 

Lot-casting . . . 32, 421 

Lucerne, medica : came fr. Media 

to Greece, 306 ; to Italy . . 307 
Luppolo, lupulus (hops) : fr. 

lupus? .... 360-1-2 
Lus, llysian, les (leek) . .159 

Lycians : an Iranian people . 27 



Lyopa, lyope (cow) 



PAGE 
429 



Macedonians (long men) : half- 
Hellenic. 

Madeira : fr. materia (timber) 

Magnolia : fr. America 

Maira (twinkler) = Sirius 

Maize (Indian corn, walsch-korn, 
&c.) : fr. America ; its rapid 
spread . . . 384,395 

Malan (grind) : mehl, meal 

Mall! (hill), Di-mallum 

Malt : fr. melt .... 

Malum, fiakov : any large tree 
fruit ..... 

citreum : fr. Kidpog 

Mamaliga : made of maize . 

Mana-seths (men-seed, world) 

Mandarin orange 

Mannus (ass, horse, mule) . 

Mantela, — lia (table-cloths) 

Maple .... 

Marasca, merise (sour cherry) 

Marga, margila, G. mergel, marl 

Marmalade, marmelo : fr. meli- 
mela 186 

Maron, Maroneia . 70- 1-2, 447 

Marten : tamed . . . 347*8 

Maschel, fimmel (hemp) . 151-2 



61 

479 

395 

70 



497 

436-7 

429 

125 

. 499 

333-4 

• 384 

• 423 

• 339 
. 462 
. 142 

222, 481 

301, 488 

377 



Maslo (oil, butter) 

Massa (lump of dough) : fr. \iaZ,a 

Massagetse : nomad Iranians, 27, 

28 ; had horses, 47 ; sacrif. them 

to Sun 

Massic wine .... 
Mastich-tree, 314 ; its resin chewed 
Mattock : single-blade (id-iceWa, 

two-pronged dl-iceWa 
Mead : in Pannonia (fiedog), 122, 

126 ; drunk by Aryans . 
Meall (hill) : Mello-dunum, — sec- 

tum ..... 
Mechanical terms unlike in Greek 

and Latin 
Mechika, meszka (she-bear) 
Medgy, Medgyfa (cherry) . 



130 
436 



48 

82 

317 

107 

126 

429 

441-2 
428 
488 



33 



5H 



INDEX. 



PAGE 

Median horses . . . 45-8, 60 
Medica, mielga (lucerne) . 306-7 

MsSog, medii, mid, middus (mead 

honey) . 
Meer-rettich (horse-radish) : fr, 

armoracia . . . 
Megarian tears . 
Mekhu (fur, fell) 
Melarancio (bitter orange) . 
Melas, Melantheus (black) = goat 

herd . 
Meleagris (guinea-hen, G. perl- 

huhn) : fr. Meleager, 27 1 -2, or 

meregha (hen) 

[or margarita, pearl ?] 
Melga, melica (black millet) 
Melia azedarach . 
Meliaca, muliaca (apricot) : fr. 

anneniaca .... 
Meli-mela (quinces for jelly) 
MeXivrj, milium, malnos (millet) ; 

Me\ivo-(pdyoL in Thrace . 
Melis (badger) . . . 348, 493 
Mello-dunum, — sectum (hill-fort) 429 
Melon : in Egypt, 235 ; Italy, 237 ; 

came fr. S. Asia 
Mentha, mint, G. miinze . 
Mercatus, market, G. markt 
Messapians : of Illyrian race 
Metal : a Phoenician word . 
Metals . . . 442-3, 44-5-6-7 
MeQv (wine) . . .126, 447 



126 

377 

156 
428 
337 

70 



247 

385 
390 

322 
186 

439 



238 

377 
117 

63 

443 



Micio, mieze, mishka (puss) 
Migrations : ancient and modern 
Milica (black millet) . 
Militarism under Rome 366-7, 

Mille passus, mile, G. meile 
Millet : early cultiv. in all agri- 
cultural Europe, 64-5, 439 ; re- 
tired first fr. Greece and Italy, 
never liked by Germans . 
Mi/xaiKvXov : akin to fiaifiaKTTjg 

(stormy) ? 
Minyans (little men) . 
Mirabelle (a plum) : fr. fivpo- 
fi&Xavoq .... 



493 

34 

385 

496 

377 



440 

305 
61 

288 



pac;e 
Misku, mishte, mushke (mule) . 462 
Mistil, mistletoe : for visculus 303, 488 
Mixing of species disapproved 325-6 
Molere (grind), 429, 430 ; mola 

(mill): whence G.muhle, miiller 436-7 
Molossians : half-Hellenic . . 61 
M61y .... 158-9 

Mongols : as destroyers, 29 : 

horsemen . . . 35-6, 60 
Mopyiov, Morgetes, Murgentinum 453 
Moriae (sacred olives) ... 94 
Morum, /xopov (blackberry ; mul- 
berry) 291 

Moschetto, musket : prop, spar- 

rowhawk .... 2S6 
Mosuco, mosch, miisch (weasel) . 492 
Moavv-oiKoi : built on piles . 444 

Mouse : a plague ; its enemies . 347 
Mulberry : fr. Media, 290-1 ; 
confounded with sycamore and 
blackberry, 291 ; home of silk- 
worm, esp. the white m. . 293, 487 
Mule : its breeding forbidden 11 1-2 
Mulsum (honey-wine) . 113 

Mulus (mule) : fr. /zvyXoc . 461-2 

Mur, mura, G. mauer : fr. murus 

117, 464 
Mustard, mostarda: fr. mustum 163-4 
Mus-tela (weasel) = mouse-taker 

348, 492 
MvvXoc, mushke, misku (mule) . 462 
Mi'iKripog (nut-almond) = nuceres ? 488 

Myrene 473 

Myriad, fivpioi, baevare. . . 423 
Mvpov, /xvppa, ofxvpva , . 473 

Myrrh-tree 169 

Myrtle : followed Venus-worship 
fr. W. Asia to Greece, 169, 
1 70- 1, Italy, 172; its geograph. 

limits 175 

Mvprog, [ivpmvr], /j.vppivr) . . 473 

Mysians : had vines, 71, mules, 
in; invaded Thrace . . 427 



Nabath^ei in Arabia 
horses 



had no 



42 



INDEX. 



515 



PAGE 

Nagris, nauris, nairis (turnip) . 440 
Napus (turnip), vairv (mustard) 163-4 
Narenj, vepav-^iov, arancio, mel- 
arancio, pom-eranze, aurantium, 
orange (bitter orange) . . 337 
Narodu (people) : fr. rodi-ti (bring 

forth) 421 

Kali, net : hence nettle . . 469 
Nations named fr. teeming . 421-2-3 
Nectarine ..... 322 
Nz/piov (oleander) : not akin to 

Nripevg ..... 310 
Nesaion, Niscea : horses of . 46 

Nettle-fibre : plaited, 31 j woven 

into clothes, sails . . . 469 
Nevestka (weasel) . . . 492 
New Zealand flax . . 150 

Noatis, notere, natra (net) . . 469 
Nomads : have a far-away look 36, 500 
Nuceres = |ui/f07poc? . . . 488 
Nuragen . . . . .116 
Nuts, 224-5, 294 ; for Joseph . 312 
Nux : Pontica, Avellana (filbert) ; 
Grseca (almond) ; calva (chest- 
nut ?) . . . . 294-5-6 

Oaths nullified by trick . 156, 472 
Oats : despised, named fr. goat 
{fipSfiog, aiyikurty) or sheep 
(avena, oves) . . . 432-3 
Obolys, woble, yabluko (apple) ; 
obelis, wobalne, yablani (apple- 
tree) .... 498-9 
Oculi (bulbs), 225 ; oculus (eye) . 429 
OZnotria : named fr. olvwrpov 75, 452 
Oil • . 89, 90, 94, 98-9, 100 
QlvcLQ, o'ivapov, olvrj . . 255, 450 
Oineus (wine-man) ... 70 
OIvoq (wine) . . 72, 447-9, 450 
Oinotropoi at Delos . . . 254 
OlviDTpov (vine-pole) . . 75> 45 2 
Olu, olovin, 61 (ale) . . .125 
Old folks got rid of . . 32, 413 
Oleander : its native look in S. 
Europe deceptive, 309 ; fr. Asia 
Minor .... 310-1 



PAGE 

Oleaster (wild olive) . . 89, 91-2 
Oleum (oil) : fr. iXaiov, 97 ; ol. 

Liburnicum . . 99 

Oliva (olive) : fr. IXaia, 97 ; felix 
ol., 94; vivax ol., 95 ; ol. Lici- 
niana, Sallentina, 97 ; Sergia . 98 
Olive-tree : native in S.W. Asia, 
18; only the wild o. in Greece 
till after Hesiod, 88-93 J cult - 
in Attica before Solon, 94 ; in- 
trod. into Sicily 95-6, Italy 
96-100, Gaul 98, Spain 99, 
Sardinia, Corsica 459 ; its oil, 
100 ; type of higher life . . 131 
Onager (wild horse?) ... 37 
Onion : see Leek. 

Opulus (witch-hazel) : for populus 453 
Orange: (1) the bitter, came fr. 
India by Persia (narenj, Arab, 
naranj, Byz. vepavr%iov), 337-8; 
(2) the sweet, brought fr. China 
(apfel-sine) by Portuguese (por- 

togallo) 338 

Orarium, sudarium . . 141-2 

Orestheus (mountaineer) . . 70 
'OpevQ, ovpevg (mule) . . .112 
Organum, G. orgel . . .461 
'Opivda, opivhov (rice?) . . 3S0 

'OpopaicxoQ,— aKxn (pomegr.) . 474 
"Opvfr, — lov (rice) . . 380, 434 
Osmans : ravaged Greece . . 29 
'OOovt} (linen robe, aft. cotton) 135-6 
Overrun by rabbits 344 ; mice 

347 ; rats . . . .351 
"0£uc (sharp), o£oc, uksus, uksosas 

(vinegar). . . • 79 

OzSlse in Locris . 70, 155 

P for T : palma, Palmyra, 208 ; 
pavo .... 264-8 

P initial dropped in Celtic : athir, 
iasg 453 

Pagonians in Macedonia, 427 ; 
lake-dwellers .... 444 

Palm (Heb. tamai) ; see Date- 
palm. 



5i6 



INDEX. 



PAGE 

Palm Sunday at Rome . .210 
Palma (date-palm ; dwarf-palm) 

206-208, 477-8 
Palmare, tunica palmata . 207-8 

Palmyra : fr. Tadmor . 208, 477-8 

Palumba (ringdove) . . . 258 
Pamplemousse (Paradise apple) 336-7 
Panciera, G. panzer (coat of 

mail) ; fr. pantex (paunch) . 447 
Pannonians : an Illyrian people . 62 
Pa-partis, pa-porotnik (fern) . 484 
Paper : invented in Spain . . 149 
Paphlagonians : bred mules . in 

HcLTnroq : tuft of periwig-tree . 318 
Papyrus : extinct in Egypt, 232 ; 

p. of Sicily, of White Nile . 233 
Parabia : brewed in Thrace 121, 449 
Paraveredus, palfrey, G. pferd . 377 
Parena (feather) ; par, per (fern) 484 
Pari-ti (to fly), pero (feather), pa- 

poroti (wing), — tnik (male fern) 484 
Parthians : nomad Iranians 27, 47 

Parus (sail) : fr. QapoQ . . 146 

Pasteque (water-melon) . . 237 
Patmos, Palmosa . . . 478 
Pavo, paon, G. pfau, AS. pawa . 269 
Pea : fr. Central Asia . 165-168 

Peach : came fr. Central Asia 
(persica), 320 ; to Italy (dur- 
acina, pod-aiava), 32 1 ; Pro- 
vence (gallica) . . . 322 
Peacock : came fr. India (c^kki, 
togei, Mong. toghos) to Pales- 
tine (tukki), 263 ; to Samos, 
Greece (tahos, tav5s), 264 ; to 
Italy (pavus, pavo), 266-7 J 
roast p., 267-270 ; p. isles, 268 ; 
symbol of immortality, 269 ; p. 
hats fr. England, 362 ; p. vows 270 
Pear : native to S. Europe ; the 
wild, axpaQ ; the cultiv., oyxvjj, 
airioQ, pirus, krausze, grusha, 

darde 499 

Peat-pig 32 

Pecora, la (sheep) . . . 351 
Pedare, pedamen, ttijSov (prop) . 452 



nkw (comb, orig. pluck, pesz-ti), 

409 ; 7T£»coc (fleece), tt^gkoq 

(rind, bast), 470 ; cf. Vellus, 

Runo. 
Pelasgians (=old ?) : pre-Hel- 

lenic .... 61, 426 
IllXeia (dove), irtpioTtpa. (pigeon) 

253-4-5> 258-9 
Pelzen, G., empeltar (graft) : fr. 

pellis 327 

Penka, pienka (hemp) : fr. bang 

(intoxication?) . . 471-2 

nkTTbiv, pepo, G. pfebe (pumpkin) 

237, 240 
Pepper-tree .... 395 

IlefHOTepd (pigeon) : fr. pri (love) ? 

or parena (wing) ? . . 255, 484 
Periwig-tree . . . 314-8 

Persian nuts .... 295 
Persica, pesca, peche, peach, G. 

pfirsich, SI. breskva. broskvina 322 
Pesca noce (nectarine) . . 322 

Peshdad : a Pers. nut (pistachio ?) 489 
Peska, pesok (sand, grit, gravel) 168 
Petitpas (peacock) . . . 269 
Petlu, petiikh (cock) . . 248, 4S3 
Petrosilium, G. Petersilie, parsley 377 
Peucetians, Picentines . . 452 
Pferd, G. (horse) : fr. paraveredus 377 
<3>aicr}, <paKOQ (lentil) . . .166 
Qcup, <p&o<ra, facha, faza (dove) 

255, 484 
Qapfiaicog (poisoner, scapegoat) 457-8 
Pheasant : fr. Colchis (phasianus) ? 

prob. fr. Media (tetarus), 274-5; 

gold and silver ph. fr. China . 276 
Phegeia became Psophis . . 479 
&i\vpa (bast, linden), 0f\X6c 

(bark), 0\oioc (cork) . . 46S 
Phoenicians : civilize Europe, 

66-7 ; introd. wine, 72-3 ; perh. 

oil, 95-6; &c, &c. 
Phoenix (palm) : fr. Canaan, Chna 

(Phnaa) .... 204, 477 
Phrygians : an Iranian people 

27, 62, 426 



INDEX. 



517 



PAGE 

$v\ia (olive-tree ?) . . 91 

QvTtvio (I plant), (f>vTa\id, Phytios 

70, 104 
Pict : Latin for brit (tattooed) ? . 33 
Pigeon, the tame white : unknown 
in Greece till Pers. invasion, 
253-4-5 ; came fr. Babylonia 
to Syria, Cyprus, 255-6-7, 
Greece, 257-8-9, Sicily, Italy, 
259 ; Trtpiorepa, columba, 
255-9 ; symbol of Nature- 
goddess, then of Venus, 257, 
of Holy Ghost . . .261 

UiKkpiov (butter) : pinguis, naxve? 128 
HucpoSafvT] (oleander) . . 31 1 

Pila, pilum (mortar, pestle) : fr. 

pinso ..... 438 
Pilarium, pillar, G. pfeiler . . 117 
Pilus (hair), 7rI\oe, pileus (felt, 

felt hat), G. filz . . . 31 
Pine-tree, pinus pinea, Z., ttitvq 
(nut-pine) : prob. not native to 
Greece or Italy, 225 ; Pineta of 
Ravenna . . . 225-6-7 

Pink, gilliflower : garofano, ceillet 393 
Pinso, piso (bruise), 167, 430; 

= 7rri<Tffu)? .... 438 
Pistachio : came fr. Persia and 
Syria to Italy, Sicily, 312-3 ; 
grafted on turpentine-tree, 314; 
its brothers terebinth, mastich, 
periwig, sumach . . 314-319 
Pisum, 7Tt<roc (peas) . . 167-8 

Pityusae (Yviza) : fr. ttitvq . . 479 
Pivo (beer) : fr. pi-ti (drink) . 125 
Plane-tree : beauty, shade, 217, 
221 ; size, age, 217-8-9 ; came 
fr. W. Asia to Greece, 219, 
220, Italy, 220-1; American 
plane . . . 222, 394 

Plants fr. Semitic lands cling to 
S. Europe ; those fr. Iranic 
reach Central or N. Europe 

363-4, 479 
Plants, the track of: is that of 
culture in general . . . 398 



Platanus, -rrXaraviOTOQ (plane) . 220 
Plaumorati (first wheeled plough) 437 
Plent (buckwheat) . . .388 
Ploskon, poskom (hemp) = flahs, 

fahs . . . . 472 

Plough : early names = hook : 
yvrjQ, hoha, szaka, 435 ; wheeled 
plough invented by Gauls : plau- 
morati, plovum, plugii ." . 437 
Ploughing, 64 ; plough-ox . . 50-I 
Plum - brandy : slivovica, 289, 

tchuka 384 

Plum-tree : came fr. Asia to 

Greece {kokkv-htjXov), and Italy, 

277-8 ; plum forests in Bosnia, 

Servia ..... 2S9 

Podarge : a harpy ... 49 

Pcsnus, Phcenice : fr. Canaan, 

Chna . . . . . 477 
Poganka (buckwheat). . . 387 
Polenta of maize, buckwheat 384-8 
IEoXjc, populus . . . 33, 421 
Pomatum : fr. pomum . . 1 30 
Pomegranate : followed Venus- 
worship fr. SW. Asia to Greece, 
180-2; Italy, 182-3; its sym- 
bolism, 1 81 -2-4 . . 474*5 
Pomeranze (bitter orange) . . 337 
Porno di paradiso, d'Adamo 336-7 
Pomum : any large tree-fruit . 499 
Pondus, pound, G. pfund . . 377 
Pontic nut (filbert ?) . . 294-5 
Poppy .... 235-6 
Portogallo, protokale (sweet 

orange) 338 

Potato : fr. America thro' Italy, 

liked in N. Europe . . 395-6, 498 
Potter's wheel : how old . 67,440-1 
Povoloka (silk ?) 469 

Prsecoqua (early ripe) : corrup. to 
(3epucovKa, al-barquq, " apri- 
cock," abricot, G. aprikose 321-2 
Pramnian wine ( = 7rapaf3ir] ?) . 449 
Pres-ti, root pred- (spin) . . 442 
UpiadrjXa, Dae. (briony) . . 360 
Privet : for spear-shafts . . 31 



5 i8 



INDEX. 



PAGE 

Propago : G. propfen (graft) . 327 
Propedula (cinquefoil) . . 428 

Prunum, npovuvov (orig. sloe, 
then plum) 287 ; prugnola, 
prunelle (sloe) . . . 288 

Psittake on Tigris (fr. TnaraKiov ?) 489 
Psophis : its " virgins " . 214, 479 
Tlriaaio ( = pinso, piso?) . . 438 
TlTvoaio (fold), tttvx^Q (layers), 
ttvkvoq (compact), ttvZoq, buxus, 
box . . . ; 473-4 

Puis, pultis (porridge) : fr. ttoXtoq 436 
Pumpkin : oiicva, tykva 234-6, 240, 458 
Punicum malum (pomegr.) . 183-4 

Piishka, SI. (cannon) ; fr. buxus. 179 
Puss, buse, bise .... 493 
UvpoQ, pyro, purai (wheat) : akin 
to pyrei (quitch), pure (tare), 
fyrs, furze, 431 ; unlike Latin . 438 
Hv%og, buxus, box : fr. Trrvaoia 473-4 

Quairnus, quern : akin to yvocg 436 
Quince : fr. Cydoniain Crete 185-6, 333 
Quius, quick (alive) . . . 483 

R for S : aurum, aurora . . 436 
Rab (slave), rabota (labour) . 436 

Rabbit : came (fr. Africa ?) to 
Spain, S. Gaul, Italy, 343-4*5; 
bred too fast, 344 ; rabouillere 491 
Radix Syria, radish, G. rettich . 377 
Ragas (horn) ; ragotine (horn- 
beam ? spear) ; Raguttis, G. 
Hornung (February) . , 302 
Raip, reif, rope : orig. osier . 467 
Rams, ramsen, buck-rams . .156 
Ranunculus : fr. Turkey . . 392 
Rape-cole, G. kohl-rabi : fr. caulis 

ra Pi 399 

Rape-seed, G. raps, riibsen : fr. 

rapicium .... 399 

"Pclttvq, rapum, repa, rope, rofa, 

G. rube (turnip) . , . 440 
Rat (hfat = krot, kertus) ; reached 

Europe about fall of Rome (?) 

351 ; greater rat in last century 352 



Ratis (for pratis), raith, reden. 

rhedyn (fern) .... 484 
Razn (house) .... 464 
Receptivity a condition of progress 398 
Renzo (lawn) : fr. Rheims . '143 
Repa, rebe (vine), reb-huhn (part- 
ridge) 467 

Repina (maple) ; repiy (thorn) ; 

so acer 481 

Rhodeia, Rhodope . . . 1S8 
Rhodo - daphne,— dendron (ole- 
ander) .... 309, 4S8 
'F6doi>, fipoSov(rose) 189; fr.vareda 475 
Rhceae, poiai (pomegranates) . 180 
Rhus, povQ (sumach), &c.) . . 318 

Rhyg, riguet (rye) : borr. fr. Teut. 434 
Rice : came fr. India (vrihi) to 
Persia (brizi, hence opv'Ca ; bir- 
inj, hence opivdal) 379, 380; 
to Baclria, Babylonia, 380-1 ; 
to Spain with Arabs, 381 ; 
Italy, 382 ; America . . 383 
Rimmon, pififiai, poiai (pomegr.) 474 
Rimmon, Hadad-R. (sun-god) . 1S0 
Roma, romeira (pomegr.), romano, 

romaine (steelyard) . . . 183 
Roman culture extended to Cen- 
tral, N. and E. Europe, 
373-4-5; attitude of Romans 
and Greeks towards these . 373 
Rome fell (1) by stupidity in eco- 
nomics, 366, mechanics, 367, 
navigation, 368, agriculture, 
369 ; (2) by intrusion of Oriental 
ideas, 370, and blood . .371 
Ropes : of twisted hide, byblus, 

I 3^-7» osier, 466-7; lime-bast 467-8 
Rosa : fr. po8'-a } poSia . 475 

Rose, the double : unknown to 
Homer, 187, and in Old Test., 
188 ; came fr. Central Asia to 
Greece, 189, Italy, 191; win- 
ter roses. 192; rose as symbol, 
188, 190-3-4 ; rosalia, Pascha 

rosata 194 

Rossi, wild horses on the . 38-9 



INDEX. 



519 



PAGE 

Rozh, rezh, rosz (rye) . . 434 

Rugis, ruggys, rugr, ryge, rye . 434 
Ruma (teat), Ruminus, — na, ficus 

Ruminalis .... 458 
Rumpi (festoons for vines) . . 453 
Runo (fleece) : fr. ruv-ati (pluck) 409 
Rusalka (nymph) : fr. rosalia . 194 
Rye : despised by Romance na- 
tions, 433 ; has two names ; 
(i) secale, segola, seigle, a'ucaXi, 
secare, thekere; (2) SI. rozh, 
rezh, rosh ; Lith. rugis, ruggys ; 
Teut. roggen, rugr, ryge, (rhyg, 
riguet) 434 



S in Celtic for X : ess, dess, les, 
ses 159 

Saale (salt river), Salassi, &c. . 411 
Sabaia, — ium (beer) . . .121 
Sabellians in Italy ... 63 
Sabos, Savadse ="Y*?c, Hyades 71, 448 
Sabus, " ancestor of Sab ines " . 451 
Sacse : an Iranian people, 27 ; 
equestrian nomads fr. Oxus to 
Danube ..... 47 
Sacer, sacre, sagro, sakalas, sokol 
(saker-falcon) : mis-transl. of 

ikpa% 486 

Ssetabis (Xativa) : linen, 142 ; 

rag-paper .... 149 
Safflow, zaffer, asforo : fr. India 201 
Saffron, Kp6ice>Q : fr. SW. Asia 
(kark6m) 198 ; acclimat. by 
Arabs in Spain (azafran) . 200 

Saggina (black millet) . . 385 

Sagro (gun) : prop, saker-falcon . 286 
Sagum (mantle) .... 145 
.Sahs, seax (sword) = saxum (stone) 445 
Sal-, Hal, in Germ. names = salt : 

is Hal- Celtic ? . . 410-1 

Salbe, salve (butter?) . .130 

Samolus (mistletoe?) . . . 488 
Sancus, god of Sabines . .451 
Saracen horses and camels . . 43 
.Saraceno, grano ; ble sarrasin . 387 



PAGE 

Saraparai (beheaders) . 427-8 

2 -'tpSig (year) . • . . . 466 
EapdoviKov (Colchian linen) 134, 466 
Sapi, ai-aapov .... 164 
Sarmatians : nomad Iranians, 27, 

62 ; tattooed, 33 ; rode horses 47 
Sarpo (I lop), sarmentum (twig) 

438 ; cf. aprcri, sriipu. 
Satres : had oracle of Bacchus . 71 
Sauer-kraut : came fr. Tartars (?) 

to Slavs and Germans . . 399 
Savoy, Chou de Milan, G. wirsing 399 
Scalogno, scallion, shalot . • 154 
Scheffel (bushel) : fr. scapilus . 277 
Txivog (mastich-tree) . . .317 
Schmalz (liquid butter) . .130 
S % oTi/oc (120 ft.) . . .438 

Schon-dinglein, — thierlein(weasel) 492 
Scraef, screona, escregne (under- 
ground dwelling) . . .411 
Scythians : nomad Iranians, 27, 
62 ; had horses, 47 ; bullock- 
carts, 49, 50 ; made mead, 126 ; 
butter .... 127-8 

Sebocc, hebauc, G. habicht, 

havoc, hawk .... 283 
Secale, segola, seigle, secare, 

thekere (rye) . . . 433"4 

Segel, segl, sail : fr. O. Ir. seol 

(or sagulum ?) . . .146 

Seidel (pint) : fr. situla . . 456 
Sem, sim (silver) : fr. d-a^/xng 

(bullion) . . . . 443 

Semele = zemlia (earth) . 72, 449 
Semiramis, worshipped as dove . 257 
Semites, 27 ; use horses, 43-4 ; 
civilize Europe, 66-7-8; in- 
troduce wine, money, alphabet, 
72-3 ; transplant trees to Italy 324 
Seol, sool (sail) . . . .146 
Serere (to sow) .... 430 
Shalot, echalotte : fr. Ascalon . 154 
Sheep plucked, not shorn . . 409 
Shikmim, shikmoth (sycamore) . 291 
Shirt : a Northern invention . 144 
Shoeing of horses : unknown 425-6 



520 



INDEX. 



Shushan, Susa : fr. susan (lily) . 475 

2i'/3tfjj (pomegr.) 181 ; seb . . 474 

Sicera, aiKepa : fr. Heb. shakar . 499 

Sickle, G. sichel : fr. secula . 377 

Sicyonian berry (olive) . . 95 
Si?)] (pomegr.) 180 ; Side, Sidene, 

&c 181 

Sieves : of linen . . . 142 
2t/cuc, Sicyon, <TiKvoQ,mKva i 235-6 ; 

avKva, rvKva, SI. tykva . . 458 
Sild, selidi, sil-ke (herring) : fr. 

salt 411 

S«'Xt, as-aeXig . . . .164 

Siliqua Syriaca (carob) . . 241 

Silo [asylum?] .... 480 
Silphium, ai\<piov (a spice) . 96, 153 
Silver : two names, (1) apyvpog, 

argentum, (2) silubr, srebro, 

siraplis 443 

Sinapis, crlvam, G. senf (mustard) 

163, 377 

Stroc, zhito (corn) : unlike Latin 432-8 
Skauda-raip (shoe-string) . . 467 
Skulls made drinking bowls 32, 413 
Slavs : settled in Greece, 30 j wor- 
shipped horses . . .54-5 
Sliva (plum), sloe, schlehe . . 288 
Slivovica (plum-brandy) . . 289 
Smakka, smokva : fr. oincov 456-7 
Smells, strong : a counter-charm 158 
2/HXa£, — Xoc (a creeper) =khmeli? 361 
Smor (butter) . . . .130 
Sneis (twig), sneise (string) . 467 
Soap : a Northern invention. 100-1 
Soc, soch, sech (ploughshare) . 435 
Sochivo, chechevitsa, SI. (lentils) 166-7 
Sokha, szaka (hook, plough) . 435 
Solarium, sollar, G. sbller . . 117 
Somaro (ass) . . . 460-1 
Sorgo (black millet) . . . 385 
STradiZ, (palm branch, &c.) . 209, 478 
Spargel : fr. asparagus . . 377 
27rdpra, oirvpig, sporta (broom, 

hemp) 47I 

Spartum, esparto . . 134, 151 

Spatha, oir&Qi) . , , 442, 478 



Spelt : &id, yavas, 62 ; unlike Latin 


PAGE 

438 


Spicarium, G. speicher (granary). 


377 


Spindle : how old 


67 


Spinea, spionia (kind of vine) : 




ipivojtai, tyivagl 


453 


Srupii, serp, SI. (sickle) 


438 


Stakles, stanu (loom) . 


442 


Stamen, (rrrj/jnov (warp) . 


442 


Stipula, stiblo (any stalk) . 


430 


Stone-building : came fr. S. Asia 




to Greece, Italy, 114 ; unknown 




to early Celts, Germans, Slavs. 




115 


-117 


Stone-tools : lasted far into metal 




age .... 445-6 


Storax-tree in Syria ; yields in- 




cense .... 318-9 


Stramenta : for beds . 


144 


Strata via, street, G. strasze 


117 


Strawberry-tree (arbutus) : used 




for fodder . . . 304-5 


Strutheum malum (quince) . 


186 


Suber (cork oak) 


457 


Sudarium (napkin) 


141 


Sugar-cane : introd. by Arabs 




(zucchero) .... 


390 


Sumach : in Sicily yields fine 




tan, 314-5 ; introd. by Arabs 




(sommaq) .... 


3i8 


Sunflower : in the steppes . 


240 


Supparus (sail, veil) . 


141 


Sus (horse) : Semitic . 


40 


Susan (lily) 189 ; Shushan, Susa, 




475 > a-zucena 


476 


Susina, endrina (plum) 


288 


Svatovit : god of light 


55 


Sveklu (beet) : fr. <t£vt\ov . 


377 


Sycamore, sycamine : fr. Egypt 




or Syria (shikmim, — m6t) 


29 r 


Sycophant .... 


86 


Su/ca/itvoc, ovKOjxopoq (sycamore, 




mulberry), avKanr\via . 291-2 


, 458 


cvkov (fig), 236; for (tFikov = ficus, 




smakka, smokva . . * 


«8-9 


Szarmonys, szerm., G. hermelin, 




ermine 


492 



INDEX. 



52J 



TforD : citrus, cotonea, Euretice, 

tseda 333 

Tadmor, Palmyra . 208, 477-8 

Tamar, tomer (date-palm) 205-8 

Tanais (=Jaxartes) : Iranian word 47 
Tawg, Attic Tau>g for raFwg = pa.vo 

264-6-7 
Tarantas (steppe vehicle) . . 240 
Taterkorn, Tatarka (buckwheat) 387 
Tattooing : sign of high birth . 33 
Taxo, taxus, tasso (badger) : fr. 

G. dachs .... 493 
Taxus, tasso, tisu(yew),ro£ov (bow) 407 
Tchuka (plum-brandy) . . 384 
Tegula, tuile, G. ziegel . . 117 
Tekin-ti, tochi-ti (turn), tokari 

(turner) ... -493 

Tticrwv, Ttyyy), rvicog, tevxw • 493 
Terebinth : native to Persia, 312, 

314-317, 489 
Termes (palm-branch) . . 478 

Terzeruolo (horse-pistol) : prop. 

male hawk .... 286 
Ttrapog, Pers. tedzrev, SI. teterev 
(pheasant) ; Fin. tetri, Sw. 
tjader (bustard, quail, &c.) . 275 
Teucrians : had vines, 71 ; in- 
vaded Thrace . . . -427 
Teukros, Tychios : (rt ux w ?) • 4°7 
Texere, tuk-ati (weave) 441 ; tela 

(web) 442 

Thaho (clay) . . .407, 493 
Thales : falls on his feet . . 92 
Thesprotians : half-Hellenic . 61 
Thiuda, thiudisk, deutsch : fr. tu 

(swell) 421 

Thousand : no common Aryan 

word for 33, 423 

Thracians : tattooed, 33 ; horse, 
men, 54 ; important link, 62-3, 
429 ; worshipped Bacchus, 70, 
71-2; brewed fipvrov, 7rapa(3lrj, 
121; wove hemp, 132; Aryan, 
but not Iranian . . 427-8 

Thread : of 360 (aft 365) strands, 

133. 465-6 
34 



Tik, tyuk (hen), dik (cock), 

Mong. takia .... 249. 
Tilaventum, now Tagliamento . 459. 
Tilia (linden), tilise (bast), tiglio 

(hemp rind),|teiller (crush hemp) 468: 
Timrjan (build) .... 464 
Tina (tub), 454 ; tinunculus (kes- 
trel) 487 

Tma (darkness, ten thousand) . 423, 
Tobacco : fr. America, a curse, 

396 ; tames the wild . . 498; 
Togarmah : bred horses, 44; mules 1 1 1, 
Tomato : came fr. America to 
, Italy (pomi d'oro) . . . 396. 
Tona, G. tonne, tun, &c. . . 454 
Tourao (weasel) .... 492: 
T6£ov (bow) : akin to taxus (yew) 407 
Traduces (festoons for vines) . 453. 
Tpdyog (goat, wild hg), rpaydoj 

(not bear) .... 433. 
Tree-culture : elevates man, 102- 
109 ; protected by laws, 108, 
460; daughter's dowry 215-6,480 
Tree-fodder in S. Europe 304-308 

Tpiavra-(pv\\ed (rose) . . . 476 

Tri-glav (three-headed) : Evil One 55. 
TpoYoe (badger), rpoxog (potter's 

wheel) .... 68, 493. 
Troglodytes . . . .412 
Tropaeolum majus (capuchin 

cress) : fr. America . . 394 

Trutina, tpvt6lvi\ (balance) = SI. 

trust! (cane) . . . .481 
Tuk-ati (weave), a-tukati (in- 

texere), a-tuku, u-tok (woof) 441-2 
Tulip : came fr. Turkestan with 

Turks, Crim-Tartars . 391-2 

Tulipano (tulip) : fr. turban . 391 
Tulip-tree : fr. America . . 395 
Tunica : a Phoenician word . 66 
Turcicum frumentum (buckwheat) 387 
Turkomans : as horsemen . . 36 
Turkey-cock : fr. America . 395, 497 
Turks : as destroyers, 28 ; horse- 
men, 34, 60 ; introduce trees, 
298-9, flowers . . -391 



522 



INDEX. 



Turnip : early cultiv., 65 ; re- 
claimed in Europe . . 399 
Turpentine - tree : in Persia, 

Arabia, Syria, Palestine . 314-317 
Turris, tower, G. thurm . .117 
TvKa = <JVica (figs) ; Tvicff, Tvxn . 458 
Tykva (pumpkin) : fr. <wcua, tvkvo. 456 

Umbrians in Italy ... 63 
Under the Olives, 'Y7r-£\aioc . 93 
Underground dwellings in winter, 
32 ; tunc, screona, yinrr], zhu- 
pishte, 0w\6oc, TpuyXr], bor- 
deitz .... 411-2 

Unio (onion) . . . .160 
Uranos, Varunas : sky personified 32 
Ursus : for urctus, dpicTog . . 428 
Usil (sun-god) = Aurora ? . . 442 

Vaddjus, G. wand (wall) : orig. 

wattle ..... 464 
Vard, vareda, (3p65ov, podov (rose) 475 
Varunas = Uranos ... 32 
Vasculum, flask, fiasco, flacon, 

flagon. .... 456 

Vellus (fleece) : fr. vello (pluck) . 409 
Veneti : of Illyrian race, 62 ; 
occupied E. Italy, 63 ; lake- 
dwellers .... 444-5 
Verp-ti (spin), varpste (spindle) . 442 
Vetch, vicia, (3ikoq, (3uciov 168, 377 
Vieo, vlmen, vitis, vitex, vitta . 449 
Vilvan (pluck, rob) . . . 409 
Vindobona : fr. vindos (white) . 431 
Vine : legends of origin in Greece, 
Thrace, &c. , point to Syria, 70- 
73 ; its true home, 73 ; methods 
of training, 75, 453 ; in Italy, 
75-6; in Gaul, &c, 76-78; 
checked by Domitian, Pombal, 
79j 453 ; suppressed by Arabs in 
Asia, Africa, 79, 80; declined 
in Greece, Italy, 80-82; best 
in France, 82-3; prospects, 
83 ; Madeira, Canaries 84 ; 
type of higher life . . .131 



•AGE 

79 

450 

81 

449 

75-6 

195-6 

95-7 
394 



Vinegar, vin-aigre 

Vinum : not fr. vieo, vitis . 449 

moratum, claratum 

passum .... 

Prsetutianum, Pucinum 

Viola, Fiov, Xov : fr. Asia Minor 
Virga lanata : copied fr. eip^auovr] 
Virginia creeper : fr. America 
Viscus (mistletoe), visciola (bird 

cherry) .... 303, 488 
Visla, G. Weichsel, Vistula . 303 

Visula (kind of vine), oigoq, 

oiava (osier) .... 453 
Viszta, vista (hen) . . . 484 
Vitis (vine), 449, 450 = withe, 

G. weide .... 467 

alba (briony) . . . 467 

Aminsea, Scantiana . . 452 

Vlasu, volos (hair) = flahs 

[vellus ?] 470 

Vorsus, versus (100 ft. square) . 438 
Vratilo (weaver's beam), vreteno 

(spindle) ..... 442 
Vrihi, brizi, oryza, rice 379, 428, 434 

Wadmal (Scandinav. cloth) . 148 
Wain (wine), Ethiop., Arabic . 72 
Walnut : fr. Asia Minor . 294-6 

Wanne (tub) ; wannen-vveho, wan- 

nagas (falcon) . . . 486-7 

War-chariot, 40-1, 51-2; in- 
vented by Assyrians ? . . 43-4 
Warnes : " no riders " . 56 

Water-melon, 239; fr. India 

(hindevane, kharpuz, arbuz) . 240 
Weasel-kind, 347-8 ; tamed, 348 ; 

euphemistic names . . . 492 
Weaving : how old, 67 ; orig. 
darning across a warp, 441 ; 
terms unlike in Greek and 
Latin, in Slavic and Lithuanian 442 
Weihe (kite) : mistransl. of upa$ 486 
Weiler, wyl (hamlet) : fr. villa . 117 
Weymouth-pine : fr. America . 395 
Wihsela, visciola, vishnia, guisne 
(cherry) ^03 



INDEX. 



523 



Wilder wein (virginia creeper) 

Willow for shields 

Windhund (greyhound) : fr. vert- 

ragus 

Wine : general in Homer, 69 ; 

name Semitic, 72 ; came fr. 

Greece to Italy, 74, 450-1 ; 

cheaper than water, 75 ; horses 

washed with, 76 ; in Germany, 

Norway, 78 ; claret 
Wine-and-oil Europe ; Beer-and- 

butter Europe 
Wirsing (savoy) : fr. verza (green) 
Wispel (bird-cherry) . 
Woi, wuoy, vay (butter) ; woi-dma, 

wuoitet, woitelee (anoint) ; 

hence (Bovrvpov ? 
Wool : plucked, not shorn . 



PAGE 

394 
31 

282 



81 

119 
399 
303 



129 
409 



Zipped, Zlfifipai (pomegranate?) . 474 



Yabluko (apple), yablani (apple- 
tree) 



499 



PAGE 

Yain, Heb. (wine) . . .72 

Yavor (maple) : fr. ahorn . . 481 

Yell, yelia (fir) .... 408 

Yeva (bird-cherry, orig. yew) . 407 
Yew (Celt, yw, eo, ivin, ibhar ; 
Rom. iva, if; Teut. iva, iga, 
iw, eow) : used for bows, turn- 
ing, carving, poison . 31, 407-8 

Zalas (green), zole (grass) . . 428 

Zalmoxis : fr. ^aXp.og = %\a/n>c ? . 428 

Zebenksztis (brown weasel) . . 492 

Zeiber, cibara (plum) . . . 288 

Zelenyi (green), zheltyi (yellow) . 428 

Zelter (ambler) : fr. toluto . . 377 

Zhito (ctXtoq, corn) : fr. zhi-ti (live) 432 
Zhrunuvu, zhernov (girna, quern) : 

distinct fr. zriino . . . 436 
Zruno, zerno, zirnis (granum, 

corn) ..... 436 

Zucchero (sugar) . . . 390 

Zwiebel (onion) : not fr. zwei . 159 

Zythum, ZvQoq (Egyp. beer) . 120 



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